How to Protect Your Privacy During Pregnancy

Pregnancy is one of the most personal and significant experiences in a person's life — and it is also one of the most commercially targeted. From the moment you search for prenatal vitamins or download a pregnancy app, a vast network of advertisers and data brokers begins profiling you as an expectant parent. Understanding what data is collected during pregnancy, who sells it, and how to protect yourself is essential reading for anyone expecting a child.

Why Pregnancy Data Is So Valuable

The story that best illustrates pregnancy data targeting involves retailer Target. Years ago, Target's data scientists discovered they could identify pregnant shoppers by changes in their purchasing patterns — switching to unscented lotion, buying larger bags of cotton balls, stocking up on supplements. Target began sending targeted ads to these customers, sometimes alerting families to a pregnancy before the mother had shared the news herself. This was not a flaw in the system. It was the system working exactly as designed.

Today, that targeting has become far more sophisticated. Data brokers compile and sell "expectant parent" lists that may include a woman's name, home address, estimated due date, household income, and purchase history. These lists are sold to retailers, formula companies, diaper brands, insurance providers, and countless other businesses eager to reach new parents at a moment of peak spending.

What makes this data particularly sensitive is not just the commercial dimension. In a post-Dobbs landscape — where reproductive rights vary dramatically by state — data that reveals a pregnancy can have legal implications that extend well beyond marketing. Pregnancy data, reproductive health records, and period tracking information can all be used to infer a person's reproductive choices, and in states with abortion restrictions, this data could potentially be sought by law enforcement or private litigants.

Where Your Pregnancy Data Comes From

Pregnancy and Fertility Apps

Apps like What to Expect, BabyCenter, The Bump, and Glow are used by millions of pregnant people to track symptoms, fetal development, and due dates. These apps collect deeply personal information — miscarriage history, fertility treatment details, sexual activity, mood, and medical appointments. Research has repeatedly found that many of these apps share data with third-party advertisers and analytics platforms.

Unlike hospitals or doctors' offices, these apps are not bound by HIPAA. The health data you enter is governed by each app's privacy policy — documents that most users never read, that can be changed at any time, and that often include broad language permitting data sharing with "partners" and "service providers."

Period tracking and fertility apps create an additional vulnerability: the data in these apps can reveal pregnancy status even before a person announces it. Missed period logs, positive pregnancy test entries, and shifts in cycle tracking patterns are all signals that can be extracted, sold, or subpoenaed.

Baby Registries

Creating a baby registry on Amazon, Target, or BuyBuyBaby feels like a practical, private task. In reality, most baby registries are publicly searchable by default. Anyone with your name can find your registry — and with it, your name, due date, delivery location, shipping address, and a detailed list of what products you plan to purchase. Data brokers and marketers routinely scrape registry data as a source of confirmed pregnancy signals tied to real identities and addresses.

Beyond the registry itself, the act of creating one prompts an immediate flood of marketing from the retailer and its partners. That data — your confirmed pregnancy, your due date, your purchasing intent — becomes part of a commercial profile that can follow you for years.

Social Media Announcements

Pregnancy announcements on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are among the most joyful moments people share publicly — and among the most commercially valuable to data brokers. A public pregnancy announcement confirms identity, relationship status, and pregnancy status with a timestamp. Even with a private account, data shared with platform algorithms is used to build advertising profiles and can flow to data partners through a variety of channels.

Public Records and "New Mover" Lists

Data brokers do not rely solely on apps and social media. They aggregate data from birth records, hospital announcements, public property filings, and retail purchase behavior to compile "new parent" and "new mover" lists. When a baby is born and registered, that information enters public records — and within months, it finds its way into broker databases where it is combined with purchase history, address data, income estimates, and demographic information to create a profile sold to marketers.

Prenatal Care, Genetic Testing, and Hospital Records

The medical side of pregnancy generates a separate category of sensitive data. Prenatal care records — including blood tests, ultrasound results, and provider notes — are covered by HIPAA when held by a healthcare provider. However, HIPAA only covers the provider, not every entity that data might touch.

Genetic testing performed during pregnancy is particularly sensitive. Non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT), amniocentesis, and carrier screening produce detailed genetic information about both the fetus and, by inference, the parents. Some genetic testing companies retain this data and have their own privacy policies governing how it is used and shared. Reading those policies before submitting a sample is important — genetic data, once generated, cannot be changed.

Insurance companies receive detailed billing codes from every prenatal visit, which creates a health record trail tied to your name and policy number. While the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) prohibits health insurers from using genetic information in coverage decisions, this law has gaps — it does not cover life insurance or disability insurance, for example.

Steps to Protect Your Privacy During Pregnancy

Choose Privacy-Focused Pregnancy Apps

Before downloading a pregnancy or fertility app, research its privacy policy. Look for:

• Whether data is stored locally on your device or uploaded to company servers
• Whether the app shares data with third-party advertisers or analytics platforms
• Whether the privacy policy addresses law enforcement requests and what standard they apply before complying
• Whether you can use the app without creating an account tied to your real identity

Consider using a pseudonym and a dedicated email address — not your primary account — for any pregnancy-related app or service. This limits the ability of data brokers to connect your health data back to your real identity.

Set Your Baby Registry to Private

Most major retailers allow you to change your registry visibility settings. Make your registry private or share it only through a direct link sent to people you trust, rather than leaving it publicly searchable by name. This prevents your name, address, and due date from being scraped by data brokers and marketing firms.

Be Intentional About Social Sharing

You do not have to keep your pregnancy secret to protect your privacy. But consider:

• Setting your social media accounts to private before making any pregnancy-related posts
• Sharing detailed information — due date, hospital, exact location — only with trusted friends and family through private channels rather than public posts
• Waiting until you are comfortable before making any announcement, knowing that once information is public it is difficult to contain
• Avoiding publicly sharing ultrasound images that include identifying details like your name, hospital name, and date

Use a Separate Email for Pregnancy-Related Signups

Every baby product newsletter, registry confirmation, app account, and parenting forum signup adds your email address to a commercial database. Create a dedicated email address specifically for pregnancy and baby-related signups. This limits the ability of data aggregators to tie all of this activity back to your primary identity, and it keeps your main inbox from being permanently categorized as a new parent target.

Review Health App Permissions

Go into your phone settings and audit the permissions granted to any pregnancy or fertility apps:

• Location: Pregnancy apps have no legitimate need for your precise GPS location. Disable this permission.
• Contacts: No health tracking app needs access to your address book.
• Ad tracking: On iOS, deny the app permission to track your activity across other apps. On Android, opt out of personalized ads in your Google account settings.
• Camera and microphone: Disable unless there is a specific feature you actively use that requires these.

Remove Your Data From Brokers

The most direct way to stop "expectant parent" targeting is to have your data removed from the broker databases that sell these lists. Data brokers like Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, Epsilon, and hundreds of people-search sites compile and sell exactly the kind of pregnancy-related profiles described in this article.

You can submit opt-out requests to individual brokers yourself, but the process is time-consuming — there are hundreds of brokers, each with a different procedure — and data tends to reappear as brokers refresh their databases from public records and new commercial sources. PrivacyOn automates this process, monitoring and removing your personal data from 100+ broker and people-search sites continuously, so that your profile does not quietly rebuild itself over the months of your pregnancy.

Read Genetic Testing Privacy Policies

Before agreeing to any prenatal genetic test offered through a third-party laboratory, request and read the privacy policy governing your genetic data. Pay particular attention to:

• Whether your sample is retained after analysis, and for how long
• Whether de-identified genetic data is shared with research partners
• Whether the company has received or complied with law enforcement requests for genetic data
• What happens to your data if the company is acquired or goes bankrupt

A Note on Sensitive Circumstances

For individuals navigating pregnancy in states with abortion restrictions, or in circumstances involving legal complexity, the stakes of reproductive health data privacy are particularly high. If this applies to you, consider going further: use Signal or another end-to-end encrypted messaging app to discuss your pregnancy with trusted people, avoid searching for sensitive reproductive health topics on your primary browser without a VPN, and consult resources from organizations that specialize in reproductive privacy, such as the Digital Defense Fund or EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense project.

Pregnancy is a time that deserves to be protected — both from harm and from exploitation. Taking these steps will not eliminate all risks, but they will significantly reduce the ways that your most personal information can be collected, sold, and used without your knowledge or consent.