Thursday, January 19, 2023

Be careful when ordering "abortion pills" online

Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.

[...]

ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy and Online Abortion Pill Rx.

These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone.

[...]

[T]he nine sites are also sending data to Google that can potentially identify users, ProPublica’s analysis found, including a random number that is unique to a user’s browser, which can then be linked to other collected data.

  ProPublica
I'd say at the least, do your searching and ordering using non-tracking and privatizing browsers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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