"We Want Texans to Know Their Rights": Q&A with Mayday Health on the Impact of Surveillance on Abortion Care

**The Chart Room — Dana Graviton** The map of Texas now includes a grid you can’t see: 83,000 license plate readers turned into a dragnet for a woman’s private medical choices. This isn’t a dystopian novel’s cold open. It’s the EFF’s reporting on Mayday Health’s battle to tell Texans their rights. For a genre that loves to imagine surveillance states, the scariest part is how *boringly* it arrives—inside “community safety” tools, repurposed without a warrant, without fanfare. This connects directly to speculative fiction’s oldest warning: the database is never neutral. ALPRs aren’t just finding stolen cars; they’re building a shadow biography of anyone who visits a clinic, crosses a county line, or fails to conform to a state’s private moral code. It’s *The Handmaid’s Tale* refracted through a DMV camera. The story matters because the technology doesn’t care who’s pregnant—it just logs everything, waiting for a sheriff to ask the right question. The closer: In our stories, the rebellion always starts when someone tells the people what the machines are really doing. Mayday Health is handing out that map. We should read it before the pixels get deleted.