Advertisers use smartphone location info to send personal injury lawyer ads during and after ER visits, target Planned Parenthood visitors with pro-life ads
Bobby Allyn / NPR :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 NPR report lands mid-arc: anti-abortion groups had already been geo-fencing clinics to reach women on their phones since 2016, and months later the New York Times documented apps sharing precise location with 75+ companies thousands of times a day — the supply chain that makes both ER and clinic targeting possible.
What the story adds is breadth: the same geofence technique serving personal injury lawyers at emergency rooms is also aimed at Planned Parenthood visitors, showing sensitive-location targeting was not a single-issue practice but a general-purpose ad product.
First-order effects
- Personal injury lawyers gain the ability to reach patients while they are still in or just leaving an emergency room, converting a medical event into a real-time sales lead.
- Women visiting Planned Parenthood receive anti-abortion ads on their phones without any affirmative consent, extending pressure from the clinic doorstep into the waiting room.
Second-order effects
- Data brokers face reputational and legal exposure that forces segmentation of the market: SafeGraph later stops selling Planned Parenthood visitor data, while after the Roe draft ruling Tapestri reports buyers asking for exactly that dataset.
- Platforms hosting the resulting ads inherit the controversy — Google's 2022 pledge to auto-delete abortion-clinic visits is later found inconsistently enforced, and the Veritas Society case shows geofenced anti-abortion ads running on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sensitive-location targeting splits the broker market into firms that self-police categories like clinics and hospitals and those that do not, with the latter absorbing the regulatory and litigation risk.
- The app-to-broker location pipeline itself becomes the liability surface, pushing regulators and platform policies toward restricting what geofences may legally be drawn around rather than how the data is collected.
The trend: Smartphone location data is evolving from a generic advertising input into a contested sensitive-category commodity, with each post-Roe revelation forcing brokers and platforms to decide which physical places they will no longer monetize.