Your Period Tracker May Be Spying on You

Ugh. Forgive me: I’m a CISHET dude writing about women’s periods. Ahem. A bit of this work comes from my own imagination. I appreciate your patience.

So, anyway, imagine opening an app and tapping a few buttons: your period started today.

Mild cramps. Feeling tired. Maybe you add that you're using birth control or wondering whether you might be pregnant.

It feels a little like writing in a diary.

Except your diary may be transmitting updates about you and your anxieties behind your back.

What’s Really Going On

A recent privacy review examined six popular period-tracking apps and found striking differences in what happens to the deeply personal information people enter into them.

One app, Stardust, received a privacy score of just 2 out of 10. According to reporting summarized by WIRED, researchers found that information including pregnancy status, birth control use, moods, breast tenderness, and stomach cramps could be sent to an outside data company that wasn't named in the app's privacy policy.

Researchers also found the app communicating with outside tracking services as soon as it opened, even before the user entered anything. When a symptom was recorded, that information could be transmitted along with an identifier that allowed the activity to be associated with the same user over time. So the system was tracking user behavior and hesitation.

I feel that's worth sitting with for a moment.

Period trackers aren't ordinary apps. Women may reveal things they may not tell coworkers, friends, or even family members. A few months of entries can create a remarkably intimate picture of someone's life: when they menstruate, whether they're sexually active, whether they're trying to become pregnant, whether a pregnancy may have started or ended.

That information doesn't become less personal simply because it has been converted into data.

The Political Moment

Most of these apps have an ax to grind.

They want to collect the data about your cycle and sell it to other people. Wow, shocked? Fact is, nobody’s in business to do something out of the kindness of their heart. They want to make a profit, and there’s a lot of money to be found in this kind of data.

After anonymizing the data their apps collect, they resell it to other parties interested in that data. Most of the time, I’d presume its for targeted advertising, or for legitimate scientific research, but let’s not assume anything. Let’s pretty much bet on the fact that their data is picked up by political agents who’d like to know a bit more about your reproductive cycle.

Er, have you read anything by Margaret Atwood?

If you haven’t, you should, particularly if you identify as a woman, to help inform the zeitgeist surrounding women’s reproductive health. If anything, it’ll give you a healthy sense of paranoia. It has for me.

Newsflash: Whomever you are — a marginalized individual, someone who identifies as LGBTQI, a woman — be careful what you enter into an app. Especially a free app. Remember what they say about free apps: if something’s for free, you’re the product.

Reproductive health information carries particular weight in the United States now. Depending on where someone lives and what circumstances they face, information about reproduction and pregnancy can potentially become a civil liberty concern. This isn't a hypothetical. Courts are currently wrestling with whether abortion medication can legally be prescribed remotely and shipped through the mail, including arguments involving a 150-year-old federal law restricting the mailing of abortion-related materials. In that environment, a private company's database showing pregnancy status, missed periods, or reproductive-health activity deserves considerably more scrutiny than the average fitness app.

Privacy isn't just about avoiding an awkward ads appearing on Instagram. Sometimes it is about controlling who gets to know something about you in the first place. Think very carefully about the freemium model. If something is for free, it’s likely your information is being resold on the backend so that somebody, somewhere, can make money off of you.

Hey, always bet on greed.

Your Homework Matters

The good news is that intrusive tracking isn't inevitable.

The same review gave Euki, a period tracker operated by a nonprofit, a perfect 10 for privacy.

It doesn't require an account, and reproductive health information stays on the user's phone rather than being routinely sent elsewhere. It also offers a PIN, automatic deletion, and even a decoy screen that can be displayed if someone pressures a user to unlock the app.

That comparison between Stardust and Euki tells us something useful beyond period trackers.

When an app asks for personal information, we tend to concentrate on what the app can do for us. Does it predict my next period? Is the interface nice? Is it free? We should get into the habit of asking one more question: Where in the Hell does what I type into this thing actually go?

You don't need to become a privacy expert. Start small. Think critically.

If you use a period tracker, look up its privacy policy on their website today. Check whether your information stays on your device, whether an account is required, and whether your data is shared with advertising or analytics companies. And if the answers make you uncomfortable, remember something wonderfully old-fashioned about modern technology:

You can always delete the app.

R