Weaponizing Your Fitness Tracker Against You: Health, Fitness, & Location Tracking in a Post-Roe World

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Presented at BSides Las Vegas 2022 by

Wendy Everette

Many women wear fitness trackers, use period tracking software, and geo tag photos on their phone without thinking about the data ever being used against them. But in a world where states are now exploring private citizen bounties against women suspected of receiving abortions, could the digital trails you create be used against you? Privacy leaks through fitness tech are nothing new -see the secret military bases exposed by Strava a few years ago. But now the confluence of health trackers which record a woman’s body temperature (Oura rings), their locations (maybe you logged a walk in a new city with Apple Fitness), and even period tracking applications can be used to implicate women, even if they just missed periods due to stress, took a work trip to a city, or any other benign reason. What legal and technical protections are in place to shield women from a techno-dystopia in a post-Roe world?