Period tracking app has been yapping about your flow to Meta

Your period tracking app has been yapping about your flow to MetaWhat does this vagueness by-design mean for how we choose to self monitor our biological markers?Emily FlynnApr 21, 202633ShareA few years back, I had a running joke with the guy I was seeing about adding him to my period tracker. Being a women’s health expert, I enjoy weaving nerdy anecdotes about cycles and attraction and desires into my flirtations and marveling at my own wit and woo-woo mastery of my cyclical body. This ruse seemed like a harmless jab at my digitally tracked self-awareness – a very late millennial feminist living in the Bay Area version of coquetry. It maybe wasn’t all that harmless, after all. Turns out, the matter of sharing the data around my cycle, and potentially the even more private information about my intimate experiences, wasn’t as much of a matter of choice as I might have expected. Worse, it might have been used to sell me stretchmark creme or dental dams.I legit went through the trouble of creating this eggplant emoji calendar in order to flirt. Is this too much? Comment below 😭.Caught bloody handedThat period tracking app, Flo, has been found liable in connection with selling user data to Meta all the while promising their users they were protecting their privacy. The class action suit had 13 million Flo users included as plaintiffs, which is a sizeable chunk of pissed off users amongst their reported 75 million-strong user base.Those lawsuits against Meta and Flo, first filed in 2021 with more in the US and Canada, reveal a bigger issue in non-medical health tracking software – there’s too much gray area around consent when it comes to selling your health information to advertisers.What’s important about the legal precedent being set is in highlighting how the current guidelines around health data privacy (like HIPAA) are woefully lagging behind the health tracking tech already available directly to users. It raises a number of critical questions: What does this legal vagueness mean for how we choose to self monitor our biological markers?In a post-Dobbs environment, how do concerns around digital privacy impact our consumer choices in sexual health and period tracking apps?Why is it still up to the consumer to run safety checks when it should be the role of product teams and healthtech brands to build less creepy tech?Do we really need to be tracking every possible symptom and mood and cramp and letting private tech companies decide what to do with that data?Feeling “creamy” today? Great, we’ll let Mark Zuckerberg know.Joking about the consistency of my ovulation was already a bridge too far and a line I opted not to venture to cross with said beau. I certainly wouldn’t have willingly announced to anyone parsing through data at Meta if I had masturbated or had unprotected sex on any given day. The Flo app might have made that decision for me, though.Screenshot from push-prompted Flo check-in.For all my mental back and forths about whether or not to actually send a partner my cycle calendar, Flo might have been sending the intimate details of our sexual encounters to a bunch of tech bros behind my back. Turns out, Flo had embedded a secret “eavesdropping” tool which passed along information like menstruation cycle, ovulation, and if a user was trying to get pregnant to Meta, even while explicitly claiming not to in their privacy policy.As slippery as an ovulation flow, Flo was telling us our private data was safely hidden from prying…

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