Investigation: 294+ US crisis pregnancy centers, which try to dissuade people from abortions, share website visitor info with Meta via Facebook's tracking pixel
The investigation places crisis pregnancy centers within a wider pattern of health- and nonprofit-sector sites deploying third-party trackers. The same-day finding that hospital websites sent prescription and condition details through Meta Pixel shows how a standard advertising tool can carry sensitive-context signals.
Related coverage also traces reproductive-health targeting beyond websites: a Midwest nonprofit later used geofenced clinic-visitor data for anti-abortion ads across Meta-owned and other platforms. Together, the reports make the tracking pixel relevant not only to site measurement but to a broader ecosystem of reproductive-health audience data.
First-order effects
Visitors to more than 294 crisis pregnancy center websites have their browsing information sent to Meta through Facebook's tracking pixel, while the centers gain Meta-based measurement and advertising infrastructure.
Meta receives a new, documented stream of visitor data from organizations serving people considering abortion-related care.
Second-order effects
Privacy reviews of reproductive-health services must account for both sides of the issue: online pharmacies were also found to use third-party trackers, including Google Analytics, when selling abortion pills.
The finding sharpens the contrast between Meta's role as a data recipient and the restrictive Meta and Google content rules reported for many abortion-rights groups.
Third-order effects
If tracking pixels remain embedded across reproductive-health sites, control over sensitive audience signals will sit increasingly with major ad platforms rather than the organizations and people generating those signals.
Reproductive-health access is becoming a combined data-governance and ad-distribution issue, as location targeting, web trackers, and platform content rules shape different parts of the same user journey.
The trend: Reproductive-health organizations are increasingly exposed to platform-mediated data collection even as those platforms control the advertising channels around abortion-related information.
NEW: Facebook is collecting sensitive data about visitors of crisis pregnancy center websites - full names, phone numbers, and even whether they schedule abortion consultations. It appears to be a violation of their own policies and promises. https://revealnews.org/...
In Facebook's defense, we're collecting data on visitors of crisis pregnancy center websites because we default to collecting as much data as possible on users and selling it for profit while not caring what customers do with it, not because we oppose the right to bodily autonomy…
Wow - Facebook's tracking pixel sent data to the company when a @reveal reporter scheduled an appointment at a crisis pregnancy center. In some cases FB got name, email and phone number of a person arranging abortion consultation or pre-termination screening. https://twitter.com/…
“Facebook declined to answer detailed questions about its filtering systems and policies on data from crisis pregnancy centers.” https://twitter.com/...
.@dmehro and @grace_c_oldham. found hundreds of “crisis pregnancy” centers sending sensitive data to Facebook. The company claims this is against their policy but the data gets collected by them regardless. Nice to see a Blacklight cameo in the story. https://twitter.com/...
Experts worry that the data could be used as evidence against people in states where abortion is outlawed. Our analysis found that in states that will ban most or all abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned, at least 120 centers sent data to Facebook about their visitors.
Facebook claims to have tech that prevents its systems from collecting reproductive health data, but we found the company still knows who visits hundreds of these sites and, sometimes, if they book an appointment https://twitter.com/...
Our latest with @reveal: The world's largest social media platform—Facebook— knows who's visiting the websites of hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers. https://themarkup.org/...