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Menstruation cycle tracking app breached users' privacy, B.C. class-action lawsuit alleges (bc.ctvnews.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

VANCOUVER - A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can move forward over alleged privacy breaches against a company that made an app to track users' menstrual and fertility cycles. The ruling published online Friday says the action against Flo Health Inc. alleges the company shared users' highly personal health information with third-parties, including Facebook, Google and other companies.

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[+] [email protected] -26 points 8 months ago (4 children)

This way you don’t need to keep it in a personal calendar, which mind you, a lot of people don’t even have.

proton unlimited, proton calendar. Completely private and end-to-end encrypted.

But okay, I guess these apps can be helpful. I still think it's a terrible idea to enter information like that into an app that doesn't guarantee privacy. That's sensitive medical data. I don't give a fuck what any ToS says, no one except you should have the power to give away that kind of information about yourself.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I’ll check my subscription but Im pretty sure Proton doesn’t calculate when I ovulate.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I used these kinds of apps when I was a teenager. I could not keep up with a calendar - I tried but my cycles were too irregular to be predictable based on the calculations I could find in books and the internet. I’m transgender and found the entire experience unpleasant in a fairly intense way.

Those kinds of apps helped me immensely. Most of them offer some sort of discreet icon or password system - my parents were the type to read my diary/calendars. My periods are all over the place, and I was able to safely log a pattern in related pain/duration/quantity… most of them included links to places to find medical information. I found one that wasn’t pastel pink and just treated me like a person keeping track of their medical statistics. I got to feel neutral about a part of my body which I despised.

The problem is not that people are naive enough to hand over the information to a third party they can not trust. The problem is the paucity of information and resources for menstrual health. Periods are complicated and scary. When you’re a teenager, you’re not worried about data security - you’re worried about trying to make sure you know when your next cycle will start so that you don’t experience the hell that is bleeding through your pants in math class.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I especially wouldn't recommend anyone in the a red state in the US to use a period tracker. States are serious about prison sentences for people seeking abortions and even miscarriages. If a state like Texas or South Carolina gets ahold of that information it's going to ruin your life.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Maybe you could direct your righteous anger at the people misselling the app, not the people who use it to help them get pregnant or to avoid becoming pregnant in a proto-fascist society that has removed their right to an abortion?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

Right?? Like what is this rage against the users?!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For Women's Right Day, the android app store featured the lead of Security and Privacy of this very app. A lady BTW. Fuck me sideways how that was a ton of crap, retrospectively. She said in so many words the usual "privacy foremost" and other such obvious shit, then she also said "no selling ever".

I despair of humanity.