Ladies face “frightening privacy and safety risks” when utilizing interval tracker apps, specialists have warned.
The private info collected in these apps – together with train, weight loss plan, remedy, sexual preferences, hormone ranges and contraception use – may very well be “sold at scale” to pose “risks and harms for users”, teachers from the College of Cambridge mentioned.
A report from specialists on the Minderoo Centre for Know-how and Democracy said that menstrual knowledge can supply insights into girls’s well being and their reproductive selections, making the apps that accumulate them a “gold mine” for shopper profiling.
“There are real and frightening privacy and safety risks to women as a result of the commodification of the data collected by cycle tracking app companies,” Dr Stefanie Felsberger, lead creator of the report mentioned.
The researchers mentioned many ladies obtain the apps when they’re attempting to get pregnant, which ends up in a shift in purchasing behaviour.
“Data on who is pregnant, and who wants to be, has therefore emerged as some of the most sought-after information in digital advertising,” they mentioned.
The report said that cycle monitoring apps (CTA) “are a lucrative business because they provide the companies behind the apps with access to extremely valuable and fine-grained user data”.
“CTA data is not only commercially valuable and shared with an inextricable net of third parties (thereby making intimate user information exploitable for targeted advertising), but it also poses severe security risks for users,” the authors wrote.
The specialists level out that the collected knowledge might lead to medical insurance “discrimination”, dangers to job prospects and even home abuse if it lands within the fallacious palms.
They known as for higher governance of the “femtech” trade, together with improved knowledge safety and “meaningful consent options” in these apps and urged public well being our bodies to launch options to business interval monitoring apps.
Interval monitoring apps have gained recognition worldwide, with 250 million world downloads of the three hottest apps.
