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.
Can you name a phone that has libre hardware as an alternative?
How does trapping ourselves in yet another anti-libre app, like Apple Health, help escape anti-libre software or hardware devices?
If libre apps run on proprietary hardware, is it really under your control?
Does Drip, a libre app, move towards or away from solving this?
It doesn’t move at all. If your hardware is compromised, then it doesn’t matter what apps or software you run, right? Its not under your control.
So which phone has libre baseband firmware?
You want us doing nothing at all unless we get perfect freedom and privacy?
No, we’re simply using the same logic as you and not letting perfect be the enemy of good. Telling people to use the built in app on the most popular platform because it has infinitely better privacy than all the apps with ads is objectively good advice. My grandma doesn’t know what f-droid is. She doesn’t even know what an operating system is. She also doesn’t know what a software license is.
You have failed to tell her. Shows how little you’re doing to fix this.
Libre software is not perfect. Fake privacy is bad.
So we don’t have perfect privacy?