The privacy problems hidden in your period tracker

That one was a security incident—data that had been legitimately collected by an analytics provider was exposed due to a breach.

This one is about privacy — what data an app chooses to collect and which third parties it intentionally sends that data to. The concern isn't that someone hacked those companies. The distinction is important for us.

Disclaimer: RudderStack founder.

It's really sad to see that this is not the usual kind of software people are exposed too.

It indeed looks like the rest are "you're the product" (tm) type apps. Honestly, I don't expect much from Play Store (or App Store for that matter) these days but as a developer it's terrible what hoops you have to go through to publish your app.. Endless forms to fill out manually and then the overall store quality is just disappointing. Ads, ads, more ads and privacy and security debacles. Now it also looks like locking down on outside app stores like F-Droid.. Developers and hackers will find solutions but for the general population I'm not very hopeful. As to the period apps:

> This is also not Planned Parenthood's first run in with privacy criticisms. I wrote about similar problems four years ago, for example. The organisation didn't respond to a request for comment.

.. And it doesn't look like they care to change anything about it. Who can end this on a positive note? I hate to be this negative but I don't see it.

What's different is that the period tracker apps have women provide that information pretty directly. The data broker probably had to do a lot of work and then estimate with a confidence level. So there's a significant difference in level of effort there, and then because of the estimate the data becomes much less valuable because it's only plausible it's not certain.

This argument gets trotted out whenever people talk about privacy and protection of personal information. I hear it when people discuss LPR systems, cameras, and the like too.

These data-gathering applications of technology should be treated specially because they make it extremely easy to gather high-confidence data about individuals. I bet your data broker couldn't predict when someone was ovulating or whether they were pregnant or count how many miscarriages they had just based on purchase history? This is all data that period tracker apps capture pretty directly. The miscarriages one is particularly bad because that data could be misconstrued as abortion and in US states where that's illegal it could get you into real trouble. There's a small but vocal subset of the population that seems to want to punish women for anything other than a healthy delivery. But when my spouse and I were trying everyone we talked to had at least one if not more miscarriage stories.

I've heard rumors, maybe that far back, of women getting mail ads for baby clothes a couple weeks before having a positive pregnancy test.

I wonder about not only baby or feminine supplies, but also snack coupons and dating apps

MacroFactor is very rare in the modern software world, probably because it was created by fitness science junkies rather than VCs or engineers. Greg was extremely adamant from the start that they're charging money, take it or leave it, but selling the product itself is all they're ever going to sell. No monetizing user data. No dark patterns to drive engagement and keep you in the app. All they're trying to drive is better lifting and better eating because that's honest to god Greg and Lindsay Nuckols passions in life, not getting rich. Classic lifestyle business that'll never eat the world, but it'll pay the rent in North Carolina for two 40 year-olds with no kids.

Yes, backing up is the most obvious reason to have it live on a server from the user POV. And of course the app vendor will want more lockin and be able to keep the data hostage.

Paying for apps doesn't help as much as expected, as they'll want to keep the revenue stream alive. Solving this conundrum would require to deal with both side of the coin.

The real solution to this would be to give everyone and their dog a standardised online server with legally enforced privacy, and have sandboxed apps manage data in and out in a interexchangeable format, but I feel like I'm asking for peace on earth.

PS: we have banks for money, there should really be something similar for data.

If the vendors cared they'd encrypt it client-side and update at regular intervals so that whatever they stored on the servers was unreadable to them. My understanding is that this data isn't covered by HIPAA, which only covers licensed medical providers; you'd think that such personal information would automatically qualify for privacy protections, but [helpless shrug]

You can collect data without collecting information about who the data belongs to if you only need it to improve your statistical model. That's what we do. We do not know the user's name, phone number, email address, or date of birth. I think it's best to not collect stuff you don't need for your app to work.

Sharing with your partner is a big one.

Whether you’re trying to have a baby, buying her snacks, or planning beach/pool activities together, it’s very useful.

I (a male) use it to have my partner's menstrual cycle on my own phone.

> they (or any intermediary) could change tomorrow.

Adding to this, my understanding (IANAL) is that any promises to delete or limit sharing of your data could be swept-aside by a bankruptcy judge, putting priority on liquidating the company and its assets for the maximum amount of money for creditors.

If well-intentioned operators erase your data before the company falls into the hands of the trustee or creditors, an unsympathetic legal-system could end up charging them with crimes for it.

> I would never trust any private health data to an app. I don't care what promises or claims they make.

If the app is free software, then you don't need to trust; you can verify instead. See: apps on F-Droid.

> even if a vendor is doing the right thing today,

... they could fail to realize that they were hacked last year.

Sadly, the same issues apply to the copies of your private health data in your doctor's computer, your insurance company's computer, your hospital's computer, your pharmacy's computer, etc.

Avoiding the app reduces the attack surface. With the minor moral victory of not having gone out of your way to make it easy for the enemies of your privacy.

It's e2ee and only part of your icloud backup if you enable it. And you can separately manage read/write access from other apps.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec88be9900f/...

I love this stuff, even though its way over my head

> We are a community of researchers and developers interested in advancing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and other secure computation techniques.

https://fhe.org/

(edit: formatting)

Nobody cares that you're fat. But apparently (some) Americans care if your tracker shows that you've missed your period for one or two months before resuming as normal (indicating a possible abortion).

The article did not accuse you of anything and went so far as to say “There's nothing unlawful going on, and there's no reason to think RudderStack (or any company mentioned in this story) is doing something nefarious.”

I’m struggling to understand why you would feel the need to comment. Or why you even think the BBC would have contacted you. This is one of those moments in PR where a response with no reason makes reasonable people wonder why.

Are analytics tools, data warehouses, and marketing platforms the only types of destinations you support? Because if that's the case then your system appears to only be useful for privacy invasions.

Awesome insight. Thanks for clarifying! @bbc please update because there's definitely an implicit complicity in your article.

fyi you can report an editorial issue via email https://www.bbc.com/news/55077304