Privacy on the Map: How States Are Fighting Location Surveillance

Your location data isn't just a pin on a map—it's a powerful tool that reveals far more than most people realize. It can expose where you work, where you pray, who you spend time with, and, sometimes dangerously, where you seek healthcare. In today’s world, your most private movements are harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone with a credit card. For those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, or visiting a protest or a immigration law clinic, this data is a ticking time bomb.

Last year, we sounded the alarm, urging lawmakers to protect individuals from the growing threats of location tracking tools—tools that are increasingly being used to target and criminalize people seeking essential reproductive healthcare.

The good news? Lawmakers in California, Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere are stepping up, leading the way to protect privacy and ensure that healthcare access and other exercise of our rights remain safe from invasive surveillance.

The Dangers of Location Data

Imagine this: you leave your home in Alabama, drop your kids off at daycare, and then drive across state lines to visit an abortion clinic in Florida. You spend two hours there before driving back home. Along the way, you used your phone’s GPS app to navigate or a free radio app to listen to the news. Unbeknownst to you, this “free” app tracked your entire route and sold it to a data broker. That broker then mapped your journey and made it available to anyone who would pay for it. This is exactly what happened when privacy advocates used a tool called Locate X, developed by Babel Street, to track a person’s device as they traveled from Alabama—where abortion is completely banned—to Florida, where abortion access is severely restricted but still available.

Despite this tool being marketed as solely for law enforcement use, private investigators were able to access it by falsely claiming they would work with law enforcement, revealing a major flaw in our data privacy system. In a time when government surveillance of private personal decisions is on the rise, the fact that law enforcement (and adversaries pretending to be law enforcement) can access these tools puts our personal privacy in serious danger.

The unregulated market for location data enables anyone, from law enforcement to anti-abortion groups, to access and misuse this sensitive information. For example, a data broker called Near Intelligence sold location data of people visiting Planned Parenthood clinics to an anti-abortion group. Likewise, law enforcement in Idaho used cell phone location data to charge a mother and her son with “aiding and abetting” abortion, a clear example of how this information can be weaponized to enforce abortion restrictions for patients and anyone else in their orbit. 

States Taking Action

As we’ve seen time and time again, the collection and sale of location data can be weaponized to target many vulnerable groups—immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone seeking reproductive healthcare. In response to these growing threats, states like California, Massachusetts, and Illinois are leading the charge by introducing bills aimed at regulating the collection and use of location data. 

These bills are a powerful res