After the draft ruling reversing Roe, location data company Tapestri says two companies asked to buy device data revealing users who visited abortion clinics
Myriad state restrictions on accessing or performing abortions prompt some companies to pledge not to share sensitive mobile-phone data Tweets: @drpanmd , @nai , @elastigirlvotes , @patiencehaggin , @dmarti , and @patiencehaggin Tweets: @drpanmd : “Location data has been used to target abortion seekers before. In 2017, the Massachusetts attorney general alleged that Copley Advertising LLC had violated consumer-protection laws when it aimed antiabortion ads at women who were sitting in abortion clinic waiting rooms,” https://twitter.com/... @nai : Thanks @patiencehaggin for covering NAI member companies' pledge to not use, sell or share precise location data about visits to sensitive locations - including abortion clinics - except to comply with a legal obligation. https://www.wsj.com/... @elastigirlvotes : If you have an abortion clinic near you, make a point of getting your phone... (take your friends' phones too) near the clinic at least once a week. Make this data worthless. https://twitter.com/... Patience / @patiencehaggin : NEW from me: people are already trying to buy location data on smartphone users who have visited abortion clinics https://www.wsj.com/... Don Marti / @dmarti : “[W]hen the coordinates indicate an abortion clinic or other sensitive location...the companies won't make that connection in their databases. They might still store the raw coordinates of places where the users visited” Smart—bounty hunters would have to get _maps_ to beat this! https://twitter.com/... @patiencehaggin : Location-data company Tapestri has heard from companies trying to buy data on users who've visited abortion clinics among the Illinois-Missouri border. That data could include Missouri residents who crossed the border to have an abortion in Illinois
Context & Ripple Effects
Tapestri's disclosure lands a month after SafeGraph pledged to stop selling Planned Parenthood visitor data, and it shows why those pledges matter: demand for clinic-visit location data is real and arriving through commercial channels. The company says the requested dataset covered the Illinois–Missouri border, where Missouri residents crossing into Illinois for abortions would be identifiable.
The pattern is not new — anti-abortion groups were geo-fencing clinic waiting rooms for targeted ads back in 2016, an episode that drew a Massachusetts attorney general action against Copley Advertising LLC. What changed post-Roe is the buyer: from advertisers to parties whose interest tracks enforcement.
First-order effects
- Tapestri faces a live decision on whether to sell clinic-visit data covering the Illinois–Missouri border, where the buyers' likely use is identifying Missouri residents who crossed state lines for abortions.
- Companies holding similar datasets are immediately exposed: SafeGraph already exited the category, and any broker that keeps selling clinic-visit data now stands out by contrast.
Second-order effects
- Industry self-regulation hardens — the NAI member pledge not to sell or share precise location data about visits to sensitive locations becomes a competitive baseline, pressuring non-signatory brokers to match it or lose advertiser trust.
- Platforms and app makers face parallel scrutiny of their own pipelines: Google's July 2022 pledge to delete clinic-visit location data was later found inconsistently executed, and online pharmacies selling abortion pills were shown sharing sensitive data via third-party trackers like Google Analytics.
Third-order effects
- If state-level enforcement continues to rely on commercially available location trails, sensitive-location data becomes a legal liability category of its own, pushing brokers toward either exclusion lists or regulatory limits rather than voluntary pledges.
- Crossing state lines for care turns location data into a de facto surveillance layer over interstate travel, complementing physical methods activists already use, such as license plate tracking and body cameras at clinics.
The trend: Post-Roe, commercial location data is shifting from an advertising input to an enforcement-adjacent asset, with brokers, ad-industry bodies, and platforms racing to wall off sensitive-location categories before regulators or prosecutors do it for them.