Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.
Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff
Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.
This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.
The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.
They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.
Because its effort. We have to get the average person to care about their security and privacy before they will bother using these alternatives. It’s much easier for them to download a popular one off an app store and have the data stick with them, than it is to download f-droid, find the right app, make sure its still supported and setup their own data backup.
People are mentioning drip, and that’s on the Play Store. It’s literally the same amount of effort as installing a surveillance app.
Does drip pay to have their app at the top of the list? Because that’s about how far most people look
People are not researching privacy conscious apps and typing it in. Drip isn’t even remotely close to being among the top results for a period tracker. That’s the point, the average person prefers convenience over privacy these days.
People don’t give a shit, and prefer to stay uninformed. Maybe more Darwin awards are necessary?
Edit: Maybe that was out of line, but I’m just so fucking tired of people who choose to be ignorant.
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I admit that was out of line, but for fucks sake, there are so many stupid people doing stupid things it’s unbearable. Voting for Trump for example. And the Russian people supporting the war on Ukraine.
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I bet you won’t.
Edit:
This is about advertising, and I have zero advertising on both my phone and desktop computer.
But thanks for downvoting my response based on actual knowledge of my own systems. While up-voting an idiotic completely unsubstantiated claim.
People here a weird sometimes!?
To be honest, the backing up is not trivial for most.
Even for me, while the technical aspect is no problem, the mental burden of thinking to do the backup and then the few minutes it takes to do the backup. Not a problem for a local only FOSS app but its quite a task to keep track of 10+ apps with different backup/export options, backup-passwords and so on. I use a ToDo-App with recurring tasks but still