On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order seeking to firm up some abortion protections, including data privacy. According to data experts, the reversal of Roe v. Wade opened up more cracks for sensitive information to fall through.
“The reversal of Roe, the Dobbs decision, just again brought lots and lots of new people to the realization that we don’t actually have much data privacy and that can be a problem,” said Dorothea Salo.
It’s been on the mind of Salo, Distinguished Faculty III at UW Madison’s Information School, before the Roe decision.
“Right now the legal landscape really doesn’t control this,” she said. “Here in Wisconsin, there have been a couple of bipartisan data protection bills in the Senate and the Assembly and they just haven’t gone anywhere.”