Luján Joins Colleagues in Announcing Two Key Data Brokers’ Commitment to Permanently Stop Selling Location Data of People Seeking Abortion Services

Response from SafeGraph (PDF) | Response from Placer.ai (PDF)

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and his Senate colleagues announced that SafeGraph and Placer.ai, two data brokers, have committed, in response to their request, to permanently stop selling the location data of people who visit abortion clinics. The data brokers’ commitment follows a May 2022 letter that Senator Luján sent with thirteen of his colleagues, blasting the companies for collecting and selling the cellphone-based location data of people who visit abortion clinics and risking the safety of anyone seeking access to abortion services.

In their responses to the Senators’ letter, the two companies provided detailed answers about their data collection practices and answered the call to permanently stop selling the location data of people who visit abortion clinics. 

SafeGraph said, “SafeGraph has removed all of the visit-related Patterns statistics aggregated to businesses categorized by the NAICS Code for family planning centers, 621410. In other words, it is now impossible to access any information about visits to family planning centers from our platform.”

Placer.ai said, “the Company commits, on a permanent basis, to disabling user access to data about any additional sensitive locations that raise similar concerns—including other reproductive health providers that may not have been identified in the Company’s prior reviews.”