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Watchdog Organization Calls for Investigation into Texas Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Citing CfA Research
In late January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sent letters to the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, and Texas, urging them to investigate potential privacy violations committed by anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). The letters highlighted misleading language used by CPCs in each state, which falsely implied that they had a duty to protect an individual’s personal information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
These claims are particularly dangerous for consumers seeking reproductive care, who may not know that anti-abortion groups run facilities intentionally designed to imitate abortion clinics. “[CPCs] are taking advantage of the branding of the word ‘HIPAA,’” CfA Communications Director Michael Clauw told the Dallas Morning News in a story that was published this week. In reality, the law has nothing to do with their operation.
EFF’s letters cited complaints filed by CfA in five states, where other CPCs had made similar claims about HIPAA protections. Ultimately, CfA obtained a determination from the Department of Health and Human Services confirming the agency did not have the authority to investigate a breach of personal data by a Louisiana-based CPC. Now, it falls to the state attorneys general to stop these unlicensed, non-medical facilities from lying to consumers about the security of their health information.
New Reporting on Ties Between Trump Administration and Palantir, Peter Thiel
Last Friday, CfA’s Tech Transparency Project (TTP) published a report on Palantir’s rapidly-expanding presence in Washington, which appears to be part of a campaign to extend the data-mining company’s influence beyond the Trump Administration. TTP’s investigation revealed that Palantir’s hiring of government officials is more extensive than previously reported, creating a revolving door for veterans of the White House, Defense Department, CIA, and Congress.
Just a day after those findings were released, WIRED’s Makena Kelly reported that at least three individuals associated with either Thiel or Palantir were involved in the effort to recruit employees for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)––a small group of software engineers who are currently attempting to dismantle multiple federal agencies. Musk appears to have recruited the employees through Discord channels and other online chats; in one, a Thiel Fellow and former SpaceX intern advertised DOGE as a project to “fix the government.” Yesterday, FedScoop reported that DOGE employees oversaw the termination of staffers at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services, at least some of whom appear to have been fired after 15-minute “touch-base sessions.”
Meta Takes Heat for Nonconsensual Sexual Deepfake Ads
On Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that his company stop allowing advertisers to promote nonconsensual sexual deepfake apps on its platforms. The letter was prompted by reporting from 404Media’s Emanuel Maiberg, who identified thousands of Meta-approved advertisements for a deepfake website called CrushMate. Unfortunately, Meta’s advertising network seems to have worked very well for CrushMate; analysis of the website’s traffic by 404Media revealed that 90% of its visitors came from Facebook or Instagram.
In his letter, Sen. Durbin underscored the fact that deepfake apps do not require real technical expertise, making them easy for children to access and use. Meta reduces these barriers even further by placing advertisements for the apps in users’ social media feeds—often the same place where perpetrators of image-based sexual abuse find source images of their victims.
What We’re Reading
Texas judge fines New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas
Infant mortality rises in US states with abortion bans, study finds
USAID’s reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.
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