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According to a letter sent to government agencies on Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a U.S. company tracked people’s visits to 600 Planned Parenthood locations in 48 states and sold that data to anti-abortion group the Veritas Society, which used the location data to orchestrate one of the largest anti-abortion ad campaigns in U.S. history.
“My office began to investigate Near in May 2023, after an investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that an anti-abortion organization used location data from Near to target anti abortion messaging and ads to people who had visited reproductive health clinics,” Wyden says in the letter. “The ad campaign reportedly ran from November 2019 through the summer of 2022, after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, permitting states to criminalize abortion.”
In a meeting with Jay Angelo, Near’s Chief Privacy Officer, Angelo confirmed that as of summer 2022, the company had not […]
The groundwork for this type of abuse was laid by the so called US Patriot Act, which shredded constitutional protections. Type type of surveillance should scare every American. It’s “legal”, of course, because the data is bought, on the open market, and not demanded by governmental warrant. This does not make the practice any less corrosive. Given this data point, and a thousand others, is it any wonder that the American people have lost faith in their institutions? And rightly so. We live in a Capitalist society where our personal information is for sale to the highest bidder. The government is not here to protect you and I. It is in place to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. When respect for the Government and institutions disappears, understand that it was well earned over many decades.