Tech journalist thinks she's figured out how to shut down the Texas abortion snitch website for good

The group Texas Right to Life set up a website called "Pro-Life Whistleblower" that allows anyone to help them enforce Texas' draconian new anti-abortion law, snitching on anyone they suspect is "aiding and abetting" an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Already, the internet has leapt into action to try to disable it, flooding the site with Shrek content and furry pornography.

But on Thursday, writing for Gizmodo, tech journalist Shoshana Wodinsky argued that this is a misguided strategy, and that there is a simpler and more obvious way to cripple the anti-abortion snitch website: snitch on the website itself to its domain name registrar.

"In this case, the registrar is GoDaddy — a company that's historically known for being kind of terrible all around, but also one with a slew of rules for what its sites can be used for," wrote Wodinsky. Among the rules are that sites cannot "collect or harvest" information about people without their consent, or do anything that "violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity."

All of which, she argues, snitching on other people's medical procedures would do.

"GoDaddy has its own specific tipline set up for users to reach when they see a site falling afoul of the company's privacy rules: privacy@godaddy.com. People can also file out an abuse report with the platform, and let GoDaddy know that they've come across 'content that displays personal information,'" wrote Wodinsky. "While the examples that GoDaddy gives in the form are sites listing people's social security or credit card numbers, the Texas tipline is a pretty clear privacy violation of a different sort."

Read the full article here.