FB’s tools tracking people seeking abortion services: Report

San Francisco : Meta-owned Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and allowing anti-abortion organisations to use that data to target and influence people online, media reports say.
A joint investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Markup found that Facebook is already collecting data about people who visit the websites of hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers.
Meta prohibits websites and apps that use Facebook’s advertising technology from sending Facebook “sexual and reproductive health” data.
Also Read NFTs, crypto are ‘100% based on greater fool theory’: Bill Gates After investigations by The Wall Street Journal in 2019 and New York state regulators in 2021, the social media giant created a machine-learning system to help detect sensitive health data and blocked data that contained any of 70,000 health-related terms.
But Reveal and The Markup have found Facebook’s code on the websites of hundreds of anti-abortion clinics.
Using Blacklight, a Markup tool that detects cookies, keyloggers and other types of user-tracking technology on websites, Reveal analysed the sites of nearly 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers — with data provided by the University of Georgia — and found that at least 294 shared visitor information with Facebook.