The Mass. Attorney General, Maura Healey, received complaints that women in the vicinity of reproductive (that is, abortion) clinics were getting disruptive and targetted notices on their phones.
Short version: Ms. Healey pointed out the company was violating HIPAA ("Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act") protections. The company decided to settle rather than continue claiming First Amendment protections.
To quote from the press release:
" Advertising Company Targeted People Entering Reproductive Health Clinics with Ads on Their Mobile Devices ..... Geofencing is a technology that allows digital advertising companies to direct advertisements to users through browsers and applications on their devices when those users are located in a designated territory. ..... In the spring of 2015, Copley [the advertising company] was hired to direct targeted advertisements - using geofencing - to "abortion-minded women" sitting in waiting rooms at health clinics. ..... In its advertising campaign, Copley set mobile geofences at or near reproductive health centers and methadone clinics in Columbus, New York City, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and St. Louis. When a consumer entered the geofenced area near these locations, Copley tagged the consumer's device ID and served advertisements to the consumer's device for up to 30 days. ....... The settlement assures that Copley will not use geofencing technology at or near Massachusetts healthcare facilities to infer the health status, medical condition, or medical treatment of any individual.
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Good writeup in the Boston Globe, which includes such info as:
"In this case, Copley Advertising used a technique known as "geofencing" that aims messages at cellphone users inside a certain geographic area. Those ads specifically targeted young women at or near reproductive health clinics, Healey said. ...... "We can reach every Planned Parenthood in the US," Copley Advertising chief executive John F. Flynn said in a presentation posted on his Twitter account in 2016. "Copley Advertising can drill down to age and gender." .... According to the settlement with Healey, Copley Advertising used GPS coordinates and other location data generated by smartphones to identify people who entered an area around a health care facility. ===== rest:
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]