Tech Firms Brace for Legal Mess of Abortion Data Subpoenas

Technology giants including Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp.and Google, facing questions about whether they’d hand over users’ personal data to authorities pursuing evidence on abortion seekers, are bracing for the multi-state legal quagmire that will govern privacy in a post-Roe world.

From map searches to private messages, a trove of information stored in the companies’ data centers could be used as a digital trail of breadcrumbs linking a patient to the termination of a pregnancy, a procedure being restricted in multiple US states, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The largest tech companies, which have in the past mounted …