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Smartphone Surveillance Tech Used To Target Anti-Abortion Ads At Pregnant Women (rewire.news)
VoiceOfDoom writes: Rewire reports: "Last year, an enterprising advertising executive based in Boston, Massachusetts, had an idea: Instead of using his sophisticated mobile surveillance techniques to figure out which consumers might be interested in buying shoes, cars, or any of the other products typically advertised online, what if he used the same technology to figure out which women were potentially contemplating abortion, and send them ads on behalf of anti-choice organizations?"
Regardless of one's personal stance on the pro-choice/anti-abortion debate, the unfettered use of tracking and ad-targeting technology which makes this kind of application possible is surely a cause for concern. In Europe, Canada and many other parts of the world, the use of a person's data in this way would be illegal thanks to strict privacy laws. Is it time for the U.S. to consider a similar approach to protect its citizens? Google has been reportedly tracking users on around 80 percent of all 'Top 1 Million' domains. Facebook is doing something similar. A recent report shows that Facebook uses smartphone microphones to identify the things users are listening to or watching based on the music and TV shows its able to identify. Facebook says the feature must be turned on, and that "it's only active when you're writing a status update."
Regardless of one's personal stance on the pro-choice/anti-abortion debate, the unfettered use of tracking and ad-targeting technology which makes this kind of application possible is surely a cause for concern. In Europe, Canada and many other parts of the world, the use of a person's data in this way would be illegal thanks to strict privacy laws. Is it time for the U.S. to consider a similar approach to protect its citizens? Google has been reportedly tracking users on around 80 percent of all 'Top 1 Million' domains. Facebook is doing something similar. A recent report shows that Facebook uses smartphone microphones to identify the things users are listening to or watching based on the music and TV shows its able to identify. Facebook says the feature must be turned on, and that "it's only active when you're writing a status update."
Telling women to not do abortions is nothing bad IMO. Its what ads are about: telling us to do different stuff. Its what made google rich.
What IS bad though is to forbid abortions, because this will just lead to women who want to abort their child to use more dangerous methods.
I don't suppose there's a less biased, neutral toned article on this subject available to read, is there?
But here in the US, corporations....
"You will do as you are told. Until the rights to you are sold."
- F. Zappa
Have gnu, will travel.
I realize that people are emotional about abortion, but objectively this is no more creepy or unethical than anything else in the advertising industry.
TFA:
Fuck you, VoiceOfDoom
What is the fucking point of inserting an inflammatory / accusatory 'anti-choice' label in the article?
This is Slashdot, not some pro-choice / pro-life forum
VoiceOfDoom, go fuck youself !
So these people are "pro-choice" and others are "pro-life." Doesn't it make sense if you're an ideologue to take away the positive connotations of "pro" and even "life" by calling your opponents "anti-choice?"
Yep, TFA is about convincing women to make the right choice. But for "progressives" some choices are more equal than others.
Choosing to have a baby makes you "anti-choice".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It has just as much meaning as the term "pro-choice". Which choice? What are the options?
That of a human fetus. Which — to millions of people world-wide — is already a human being. The choice, which you and VoiceOfDoom wish to preserve, has two options in these millions' opinion:
Because they consider abortion to be murder, they don't view this particular choice as legitimate.
Not sure, whether the organizations mentioned in TFA think so, or simply wish to increase the birth-rates in USA. But even in the former case, they are not "anti-choice" in general — they are against offering this particular choice.
No doubt, there are a lot of things you think ought to be illegal — even if abortion is not among them. That makes you "ant-choice" too, whenever the choice is between doing and not doing one of those things...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, no, they aren't because they aren't forcing people to have abortions.
As opposed to the anti-abortion types who want to force people to have babies.
It goes beyond "ideology". Spreading misinformation and lying to patients about made-up bullshit like fetal pain and post-abortion suicide is just fraud and harassment.
Pro-life is more likely to be pro-death (penalty). So the moniker doesn't appear accurate. It's not about "life". It's about control. When you are seeing a doctor that performs abortions, one side wants you to have two choices. The other, only one. So one is pro-choice. And the other is anti-choice.
Pro-choice is also anti-abortion. A pro-choice person is more likely to support condom distribution and use, which decreases abortions. So pro-choice is more anti-abortion than anti-choice people. Anti-choice is about power and control (and punishment), not the baby.
Learn to love Alaska
Is it wrong to target a problem drinker with ads for AA? How about targeting problem drinkers with free booze? What about targeting young mothers with ads for 'family planning' services, or as the article suggests pregnant women with 'pro-life' services? I'm sure there is a line there somewhere. Morality is a funny, fuzzy deeply personal thing... and I guess the line will vary from person to person.
Disclaimer: I am very strongly pro-choice (where choice is the right for a woman to seek an abortion if she wants).
The left is more likely to remove the choice of gun ownership, the choice of who you can do business with, what size soda you can buy, or what you can say as a religious leader.
The right is more likely to remove the choice of whether you can kill your fetus or baby (depending on your viewpoint)
Whether abortion should be legal really comes down to a belief. When does a person become a person? If you believe a person becomes a person when they exit their mother's womb, then you should have no problem with the term pro-abortion. If that's your belief, then you shouldn't even care if there are fewer abortions. It's just a medical procedure extracting unwanted cells from a woman's body. If, however, you believe a person becomes a person before that, then under no circumstances, other than the certainty of making a choice between the mother's or the baby's life, should someone be allowed to kill the baby at that point.
I've heard people point to many tests to determine person-hood: viability, heartbeat, sensing pain, the ability to survive on it's own (which may not really happen well into childhood). It's really a question of when does a child obtain rights.
Personally, I find it unscientific and arbitrary to say a person becomes a person because they changed location.
A Trump presidency is the best that could happen to me, to be honest. I really expect this to increase our economic viability along with my own.
Then again, I'm not in the US...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The abortion part is clickbait. What this is about is if privacy laws should be stricter in the US. The information of people was sold and is used. In Europe this is not allowed. From somebody who lives in Europe, this could be a bit stricter. So how does it work in Europe?
So I worked for CompanyA who had clients (companies) that had customers (people). They decided to close and sell the product portofolio to CompanyB. The customers would still be able to keep the identical product with the same name and what not.
As we sold the product and not the customer, we were not allwed to just send a file with everything to CompanyB and have it automated. What we did was
1) Send a letter that we were going to stop
2) Inform them that if they want, they can cancel
3) If they did not cancel, they would be contacted by CompanyB
4) CompanyB (where I work now) send a letter to the customer saying they would now be dealing with the product
5) The customer needed to sign a new contract
6) All contracts needed to be verified and treated as if they were a new customer (because in reality they were)
The period of transfer CompanyA asked sometimes info about customers that, even while available, we were not allowed to give.
For me personaly this was nice, as I was working for CompanyA while being paid by CompanyB.
Other things mean that if your spouse calls for info, we are not allowed to give it, unless it is explicitely allowed. Mind you, most companies do not honor that last one.
Direct marketing to people is very restricted. It is allowed to customers you have a business relation with (e.g. people who bought something from you) but not to others. So no buying of data and sending then mail or what not.
If people ask to stop sending stuff, you better agree with that.
To me the privacy laws are not going far enough, but that is just a personal opinion.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The inflammatory title is meant to get attention. However, I also believe it’s true (for most cases).
We find it distasteful to force arbitary morals onto people or bombard them with propaganda and ads. Privacy violations are wrong too, and that’s what this article is really about. But the abortion issue itself is something that can be looked at objectively. And I want to understand how some people can claim to value human life on the one hand and then blithely throw it awas on the other hand.
There are situations where abortions are medically necessary (like when the mother’s life is threatened by the pregnancy), and there are some gray areas when it comes to serious developmental defects that are often terminal anyway. But a lot of the time, abortion is used as retroactive contraception. People with no self-control or forward planning ability have sex, and pregnancy happens. There are lots of ways to prevent pregnancy in the first place, not the least of which is to find a partner of the same sex, which is something we honestly need to push our society into taking advantage of more.
But hey, let’s just terminate human life willy-nilly because it’s fucking convenient for us! As someone who is liberal about most things, I see abortion (most of the time) as a massive shirking of personal responsibility. CHOICES have consequences, and you should have to deal with them and not force others to pay for your mistakes or, say, murder someone over it.
This is what I really don’t get about the “pro choice” people. A human fetus does indeed have an underdeveloped nervous system, so killing it is not the same as torture. At the same time, you can also kill adults painlessly, yet we don’t have clinics where you can take your office enemies to have them euthanized. A human fetus is definitely alive, and it’s definitely human. So why do people make some arbitrary distinction that because it hasn’t been BORN yet, it’s okay to murder it? (I’m using the word “murder” because I don’t want to hide behind euphamisms. Deal with it. Abortion is killing someone who is not threatening your life, which makes it at least manslaughter.)
Hey, maybe you want to live in a society ruled by social darwinism, where there’s are no rules against killing people. Most slashdotters would have been killed by now by bullies in highschool in that case, so you should appreciate the systems of laws and morals that protect you. I don’t care if you’re devoutly religious or an atheist, we have solid grounds for human societies to have ethics. And we as humans have decided that killing your fellow humans is wrong. Interestingly, I find atheists to often have a stronger sense of morality, because they don’t have religious fervor to tell them when it’s okay to break their own rules to force someone else to live by their bizarre and arbitrary religious tennets. So just to be clear, this is not a religious issue.
Indeed, putting stupid religions aside, most people find murder to be objectively wrong. We value human life, instinctively, unless we’re psychopaths. It doesn’t matter if Christians tell you murder is wrong because Christians have been known to murder in the name of their God. The same is true of Muslims. When wars are fought and terrorists bomb airports, the rest of the world stands aghast at the needless loss of human life over stupid idiological issues.
So don’t distort the abortion issue into a right vs. left thing or a stupid religious issue. 99% of religion is bullshit, and we don't get the idea of murder being wrong from religion.
Often single mothers are vilified, especially if they’re in high school. (Although most abortions, I think, are not had by high school girls.) And the fathers frequently skip town or deny responsibility. A girl who has a baby before she can finish her college degree is typically screwed in more ways th
Some may feel that abortion is similar to murder.
those women are the women who never even consider getting abortions.
You say there is an "opposing idealogy". There is an idealogy which opposes offering help and encouragement to people who are facing difficult challenges?
yes, there is. have you see what protesters write on their signs at abortion clinics? they don't right, "we want to help you," they write shit like, "murdering whores burn in hell" which i feel is exceptionally unhelpful.
Is that YOUR ideology? If so, you've been unusually honest, probably unintentionally.
you've taken a benign comment and attacked me out of personal zeal for your point of view. i hope you can learn some self-control because the world does not need more people lashing out emotionally.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is a farce and you know it. After growing up in one of these religious families, protesting, and volunteering for five years at one of these centers, these organization are fooling you. It is an emotional draw to influence political opinion and nothing else. These centers provide vague and borderline false information to these struggling you children who generally get into this situation because nobody ever told them about how things work. Sorry. Abstinence works when it can be enforce or theory, but not in real life. So, you give them some diapers and some formula. That's going to help a lot. What's this young mom going to do in 2 weeks when she has to go back to work. She already dropped out of school for the semester. You going to provide child care? Health care? I think not. That's when we dump them on the welfare rolls and then call them worthless because they can't afford the time to better themselves because we lied to them about some personal feel good agenda. We never stop to think of how the consequences truly affect things. Now we've just caused a promising you life to be relegated to some second rate citizen that we scoff at because they got pregnant. Hypocritical much?
I think this is the strength of the Democratic Party and how they are able to fool so many young people today with their Orwellian tactics.