AS SKIERS SCHUSSED AND SWERVED in a snow park outside Beijing during the 2022 Winter Olympics, a few may have noticed a string of towers along the way. Did they know that those towers were collecting wavelengths across the spectrum and scouring the data for signs of suspicious movement? Did they care that they were the involuntary subjects of an Internet of Things–based experiment in border surveillance?

This summer, at the Paris Olympic Games, security officials will perform a much bigger experiment in the heart of the City of Light, covering the events, the entire Olympic village, and the connecting roads and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect “predetermined events” of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks.

The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but tech ramifications sometimes turn around on a shorter timetable. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision—alongside subsequent state-level prosecutions for abortions—provoked a proprivacy backlash now wending its way through administrations and legislatures. At the same time, though, there may be a catch. Between industry lobbying and legislative mistakes, some of the proposed or recent rules may leave room for data brokers to still profit and for buyers to still continue obtaining people’s locations without explicit consent.

At the moment, unlike in the early 1970s when the previous Supreme Court precedent was set, broad-sweeping digital tool kits are widely available. In states tightening their abortion laws and seeking to prosecute women seeking or obtaining abortions in defiance of those laws, prosecutors have access to mobile-phone location histories—currently available on the open market throughout the United States.

“I think there is increased anxiety that is being spurred in part by the overruling of Roe v. Wade,” says Alex Marthews, national chair of Restore the Fourth, a civil-society organization in Boston. “There is anxiety about residents’ browser and location information being subject to information requests in states that have essentially outlawed abortion,” he says.