Chats, movement data, videos: During investigations in the USA, tech companies are repeatedly asked to hand over information to the security authorities. What does this mean for users?

When a crime is suspected, law enforcement agencies in the US can get almost anything, Rachel Cohen, a reporter at Vox News, tells NPR: “There’s little they can’t get by going to Google or social media. company go.”

Investigators can request a lot of data from Apple, Google, Meta or Twitter: chat logs, for example, or movement data. Facebook even has its own department for this called LERT, which is run by a former police officer.

Investigation in secretUS law enforcement agencies can request access to the data there if a search warrant is submitted. Users don’t even have to be informed about this, explains Chris Handman, former lawyer for the social media platform Snapchat and head of data protection platform TerraTrue, in an interview with Fox5: “This is the result of a law that was passed in 1986, long before many people had their own computers , let alone data in the cloud.

Normally, with a search warrant at my home, I know when the police come knocking. In the digital world, I don’t know about this and the searches don’t even have to be time-limited. That gets too much Abuse, as you can imagine.” Companies like Apple, Meta or Google can theoretically refuse to give out private data from users, but then they risk paying fines. Privacy advocates in the US have warned for many years that tech companies collect too much data from their users and that there are too few regulations about what happens to this data For example, you have to delete your data. In Europe, people are much more proactive on these issues than the US, there are talks about new laws – that gives hope.

But at the moment we are in a bad situation,” says Vox expert Rachel Cohen With new, strict abortion laws in many US states, activists for women’s health see big problems. Because there are already cases from the past that could set a precedent: “A study by the ‘New York Times’ proved that a woman made a one-hour visit to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in New Jersey. For $ 160, this data was obtained bought from a data broker who had acquired a list of all phone records who had visited that clinic in a week. Current legislation does not prohibit such a thing.” This is reported by the data protection podcast “Data Privacy Detective”.No data securityMonths ago, before the nationwide right to abortion was overturned, there were warnings to women to delete their period tracker apps. There, too, data could reveal whether a pregnancy was terminated prematurely.

But not only period trackers, messenger services or search engines collect data. Credit card companies can also collect information about, for example, the purchase of abortion pills. According to data protection officials, there is only security in what happens to one’s own data if, for example, chats are used that offer end-to-end encryption.

In addition, one should not use credit cards, leave the phone at home if one wants to visit a counseling or abortion clinic and only pay in a safe way – for example cash. Or as the data protection podcast briefly advises the user: “Just don’t create any digital data.”