Women are being encouraged to share enormous amounts of intimate information with menstrual tracking apps, providing a ‘gold mine’ for consumer profiling, according to research by Darwin alumna Dr Stefanie Felsberger.
Stefanie’s report, The High Stakes of Tracking Menstruation, is published this week by the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, where she is a Research Associate. She completed her PhD in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies at Darwin last year.
“Menstrual cycle tracking apps are presented as empowering women and addressing the gender health gap,” Stefanie says. “Yet the business model behind their services rests on commercial use, selling user data and insights to third parties for profit.”
“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.”
She argues that the NHS is ideally placed to develop its own trustworthy alternative to apps created by private companies, with guarantees that data will not be sold on.
“Apps that are situated within public healthcare systems, and not driven primarily by profit, will mitigate privacy violations, provide much-needed data on reproductive health, and give people more agency over how their menstrual data is used.”
