Digital Handmaidens: 'Your Body, Their Data'—Surveillance Capitalism as Reproductive Injustice in the Post-Roe Era

Introduction

Surveillance capitalism refers to the extraction, monetization, and corporate ownership or control of raw data, particularly through the monitoring, tracking, aggregation, and analysis of people's digital footprints, both online and offline. However, surveillance capitalism tied to the extraction and commodification of female bodies through their personal reproductive health data and digital footprints has huge implications for bodily autonomy, exercise of rights, freedoms and justice of these people as well, making it fundamentally a human rights and justice issue in need of a critical intersectional examination.

Surveillance capitalism has helped retailers master the art of predicting your next purchase before you even know you need it. Back in 2012, Target used customer tracking and profiling to assign its customers a pregnancy score, famously predicting a teenager's pregnancy through her shopping patterns—before her own father knew. Using sophisticated data mining, they tracked purchases like unscented lotion and supplements to assign "pregnancy prediction" scores for hyper-targeted advertising. This strategy paid off, contributing to Target Corporation's revenue rising from $44 billion in 2002 to $67 billion in 2012. Hard to ignore figures like these, which most likely fueled the emergence and rapid rise of FemTech and, since then, numerous challenges at the nexus of surveillance capitalism, data justice, and reproductive justice.

Reproductive Surveillance Capitalism

The FemTech—reproductive health and wellness-tracking technology industry, including digital apps, wearable devices, data-intensive products, and AI-enhanced software, across digital platforms and ecosystems—market is expected to exceed $60 billion USD by 2027, with period (also menstrual or cycle) tracking apps making up half that value alone. Period-tracking apps are widely promoted as tools for empowering people to gain greater insight into their reproductive health and related behaviours. Since emerging in 2013, period-tracking apps have become very popular, with just the three most popular ones having amassed a quarter of a billion (est.) downloads globally.

However, the market for reproductive data has grown, with its uses extending beyond retail, and its data made accessible to third parties, including law enforcement. Sensitive information from period-tracking apps is not merely used to sell products through targeted advertising but also for algorithmic tracking and targeting of individuals. However, as these technologies and their data are embedded in broader digital ecosystems, the extent to which they are being used to datify and exert control over female bodies through the data extraction and commodification becomes a justice issue as well.

On average, a person’s data is valued at around $0.10, whereas a pregnant person's data is valued at around $1.50, a 1,400% increase (Petronzio, 2014).[1]  Also, companies view this type of data as extremely valuable for their bottom line, with period-tracking apps and online platform activity data used for hyper-targeted, hormonal-cycle-based advertising of certain products to platform users. However, this same data can be used in ways that are economically disempowering, such as in employment and health insurance contexts. It can be used to influence shopping behaviour. For instance, in a prominent class-action lawsuit, a federal court jury ruled that Meta had illegally collected sensitive reproductive health information from users of the period-tracking app Flo for targeted advertising, in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act—only for Meta to settle one day before the jury’s ruling. This raises concerns, such as the use of reproductive health data not only to influence purchasing behavior but also as a proxy for one's political leanings or as a tool for micro-targeted influencing of political behavior with broader implications for democratic power.

Surveillance Capitalism’s Reproductive Justice Challenges

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge in reproductive health apps, including period-tracking apps. In 2022, the five most downloaded period-tracking apps included Flo, Clue, Stardust, Period Calendar, and Period Tracker, with Stardust and Clue experiencing exponential growth in both Google and Apple app stores. Due to regulatory loopholes and contradictory data-sharing policies or terms, FemTech, particularly period-tracking apps, poses increasing risks to users.

For instance, Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Centre for Democracy & Technology, argues that, due to regulatory loopholes, period-tracking apps often lack meaningful data privacy protections, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Federal Trade Commission Act, in the U.S. context. Next, while Stardust, the American period-tracking app, publicly claims that it neither sells nor has ever sold its users’ personal data, its data policy states, in contradiction: “they may freely hand over data to authorities on request, without a warrant or notifying the users”. Finally, even within the European Union, which operates under GDPR protections, similar privacy concerns and risks may persist. In 2022, Narrative, an American data broker, reportedly purchased a list of over 5,500 device identifiers verified to have Clue, the German period-tracking app, installed for merely $100.

The Weaponization of Data in the Post-Roe Era

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, personal data has increasingly been analysed alongside other data sources—including social media, GPS location, and biometric data collected through surveillance technologies—to monitor, track, and target individuals for prosecutions and civil suits. Reports emerged that federal law enforcement agencies routinely partner with Dataminr, an AI-driven surveillance technology company, to monitor the precise time and location of reproductive justice demonstrations and the social media activity of pro-choice protesters. Federal agents routinely obtained information through data brokers (e.g., Clearview), data-sharing partnerships (e.g., Flock), and contracting AI analytics companies (e.g., Dataminr) to aggregate and analyse these data streams for cross-state surveillance and tracking of individuals suspected of seeking abortion healthcare services, both online and off. Often, without first even obtaining a warrant, federal agents were able to use data broker loopholes, geofencing location data, automated license plate readers, social media and internet search history to enhance abortion criminalization.

In Texas, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the U.S., residents are travelling to other states with less restrictive laws and even shield laws to protect abortion seekers and undocumented immigrants from out-of-state persecution for this medical care. Further, Texas has established an abortion bounty hunter law allowing private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets' someone seeking an abortion, with plaintiffs entitled to at least $10,000 in damages plus legal fees if ruled in their favor. This includes medical doctors, abortion pill medication manufacturers, and even Uber drivers.

Under post-Roe surveillance capitalism, female reproductive health data can be weaponised against users, with risks extending beyond period-tracking apps. Even for individuals who avoid such apps, they may remain vulnerable through ubiquitous wearable technology. According to an Apple-backed research study, AI-enabled devices, like the Apple Watch, can predict pregnancy with 92% accuracy by analyzing biometric data, including heart rate and body temperature, alongside behavioral patterns such as exercise, walking gait, and sleep patterns. Through seemingly innocuous health tracking technology and even without explicit disclosure, a person's reproductive health data and status could still be potentially inferred, or that data could be used for other purposes. Also, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s ICE monitoring program using smartwatches, such as VeriWatch, has raised serious health concerns about its chilling effects, especially for pregnant immigrants avoiding care due to fears of being detained during labor and delivery.

Conclusion

Under post-Roe surveillance capitalism, female reproductive data is being weaponized against users, having a profound chilling effect. Though FemTech is ostensibly designed to empower people by giving them more agency over their health and wellness, under surveillance capitalism—where harvested data is increasingly used to surveil, track, and discipline female bodies in the service of both capital accumulation and state power—these same technologies may be transforming users into "digital handmaidens."

In an age of ubiquitous digital surveillance, how do we ensure that tools designed empower people and give them more agency over their health and wellness, as well as those designed to keep the broader society safe, don't become instruments of digital domination that diminish bodily autonomy by reinforcing patriarchal control of bodies? Answering this requires robust intersectional feminist analyses of surveillance capitalism centered on reproductive and data justice, especially urgent in this current moment of digital infrastructural expansion, democratic regression, and shrinking reproductive rights.