This week’s big news in tech: Uber behaved badly. A massive document dump reveals that it knowingly broke laws to roll out its services as widely and quickly as possible. Of course, the company can blame its disgraced former CEO. “We ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done in the last five years,” reads its pious-sounding statement. Where do you come down on this? Should Uber have paid a higher price for its actions? Or was moving fast and breaking things the only way to disrupt the taxi industry? Chime in in the comments. Meanwhile, here’s this month’s update.

Surveillance in a Post-Roe America

We’ve been mapping out the implications of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which is expected to lead about half the states in the US to ban or severely restrict abortion. One thing that stands out: The technology of law enforcement is much more advanced than it was in 1973 when Roe was decided. Back then, the easiest way for police to catch illegal abortions was to raid a clinic, perhaps acting on a tip. If a woman was not caught in the act, it was very hard to prove she’d had an abortion. The doctors who performed them were the main targets.

Today there’s a huge infrastructure of surveillance enabled, in large part, by the clouds of data we all create every day. Prosecutors can subpoena location data (particularly in the form of geofence warrants, which request data on anyone who was in a particular location at a particular time), search queries, and social media posts, as well as data from fertility and health-tracking apps. A proposed EU regulation designed to make it easier to catch child sexual-abuse material could have the side effect of giving US prosecutors more power to scan phones for abortion-related messages. Not all data needs a warrant, either: Automated license plate readers could be used to provide evidence that someone drove out of state to get an abortion—or drove someone else, for which they could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting a crime.

This means online platforms will also try to ward off prosecution for inadvertently helping people get abortions. Meta, at least, has already been suppressing some abortion-related content for years. The changes in the law will likely make companies much more cautious. A preview of how this could work is what has happened to sex workers since the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, a 2018 law that allows platforms to be prosecuted for hosting content that promotes or facilitates prostitution. It’s made social media platforms, payment processors, and allegedly even food delivery apps suspend or shadow-ban sex workers. Tailoring that response state by state will be hard, so it could affect people even in states where abortion is legal.

None of these law enforcement methods are new; they’ve been used to catch criminals for years. It’s just that now people in half the country could be turned into potential criminals. It should also make you think: How might your data unexpectedly be used to pin charges on you, or on someone else?