"We Want Texans to Know Their Rights": Q&A with Mayday Health on the Impact of Surveillance on Abortion Care

According to EFF Deeplinks, a Houston nonprofit is fighting digital surveillance with old-fashioned billboards. The group, Mayday Health, put up ads across the city warning drivers that if they're pregnant, Texas could be tracking them. The campaign follows EFF's reporting that a Texas sheriff's office searched more than eighty-three thousand automated license plate reader cameras to locate a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. Executive Director Leo Raisner told EFF that billboards reach people in the physical world without the algorithmic gatekeeping that restricts abortion-related ads on platforms like Meta and Google. The ads, expected to reach over one million drivers during their four-week run, point people to a website that shares information on abortion pills and privacy tools, and that Raisner says collects no cookies or identifying data. EFF's broader argument, restated here: mass surveillance and reproductive freedom cannot coexist, whether the tracking happens online or through a dragnet of license plate readers.

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