My Data, My Choice? Privacy, Commodity Activism, and Big Tech’s Corporatization of Care in the Post-Roe Era

Abstract

After the Dobbs decision ended federal abortion protection in the United States, experts raised concerns about digital data collected from people seeking abortions. U.S. technology corporations—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon—were conspicuously silent. Instead, GAMMA (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon) released statements and/or policies surrounding commitments to data privacy seemingly incongruous with surveillance-based business models. We examine GAMMA’s policies, statements, and associated news coverage post-Roe through commodity activism and politics of care. We reveal recurring discourses that cast technical privacy features as sufficiently protective alongside scrupulous data practices by users and that constrain the purview of company responsibility to full-time employees. A focus on responsible data management sidesteps critiques of data collection, framing GAMMA’s policy changes as corporate care but furthering commodification of individual privacy, reproducing the neoliberal subject, and upholding surveillance capitalism.