Patients seeking abortion or gender-affirming care out of state face increased threats of surveillance and criminalization from law enforcement and state officials, a new report shows.

For more than a year, abortion and privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about how pregnant people could be tracked and prosecuted for seeking care after the Supreme Court upended federal abortion access with the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Already, there have been numerous examples of a persons digital footprint being used to identify, prosecute or criminalize abortion. Just this month, a Nebraska mom was sentenced to two years in prison after police obtained a warrant for Facebook messages showing that she helped her daughter self-manage an abortion. In California, public records showed a sheriffs office had shared license plate data, which could be used to track abortion-seekers, with authorities in states like Texas and Oklahoma where abortion is banned.

But the new report from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.O.P., an advocacy group that fights against discriminatory surveillance practices, suggests that these practices could increase as state officials and law enforcement utilize new data points to track patients traveling out of state for abortion or gender-affirming care.

Traditionally, we know from abortion prosecutions that prosecutors have turned to individual cell phones. They want your texts, your internet search history, they want your location history, which can be sourced from your phone. But sometimes phones arent available, said Eleni Manis, a senior researcher at S.T.O.P.

Even in the absence of cell phone data, it is shockingly, and scarily, easy to track peoples trips to gender-affirming care clinics, to abortion clinics.