If the app could make another $0.05 selling your location to kidnapping gangs, they'd do it. There's no such thing as an app that cares about your privacy or your interests.
That's what I'm really trying to convey to many people (I work in privacy products) but people keep talking to me about "trust" which is non-sense, I keep arguing that if the data is on the server of someone, you must always assume that they'll use it somehow, it's a bit ridiculous imo to think otherwise, imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
> imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
I expect all humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. I acknowledge that many people will likely fail to meet that expectation, quite often I'm sure. But I'm never going to accept or become an apologist for this asshattery.
It's wrong to violate the privacy and dignity of other people. The correct response when you see people hurting others is not to make up an excuse about "business need", instead some anger, disappointment, and loud condemnation is required.
Stop making excuses for those hurting others so they can make money.
Yes, I agree that it's wrong, my point is really about the data itself being in their servers. Let's be real, a service nowadays DO have the choice to enable client-side encryption or methodology to be unable to consult data themselves, so any company that chose against that during development phase might have eventual motives of processing the data, my point is really about the blind trust from users which is just wrong from a security standpoint, every trust step added that you can't verify is just "faith" at this point, not security.
Term of services are irrelevant as they are breached all the time, major companies are getting fined all the time for it, we must rely on cryptography, not human trust and people needs to stop being surprised the moment they learn that the data they accepted to leave in cleartext is used, that would be a first step toward forcing the change and using proper security standards.
Want a useful action? Let's change the law to force cryptography regarding user data, attestation, SGX or whatever method (there is plenty), that would be a great start, the fact that in 2026 it's still legal to process user chats in plaintext is mindblowing.
Well, perhaps they make verifying it hard.. but what is stopping you from publishing an app in the app store, while also hosting the source code for anyone to see, and use? 99 bucks a year?
It is actually a perfectly practical choice to completely ignore those ecosystems. I am the founder and active engineer at two companies and two large open source projects and have a family, travel a lot, and have an active social life in Silicon Valley.
I also do not use any Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft products and exclusively use open source software for all of my work.
It turns out none of this is incompatible, everyone just convinces themselves it is.
Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers).
If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?
First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience.
Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you.
Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want.
From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home.
Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi.
Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own.
Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day.
At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want.
People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened.
I do own android devices for development and testing, but I do not have a cell phone plan and I do not carry any electronics when leaving home unless my explicit goal is working away from home, in which case I bring a laptop.
They'd only do it as long as the risk of getting caught and the punishment when caught made it worth it.
If the authorities that are supposed to enforce GDPR (and other data protection laws around the world) were doing their job, app makers would be a lot more careful with what they embed and what data they send where. Because these authorities don't seem to have been doing anything useful, it's now so normalized that you could probably send a $20M fine to every major app and be right about it.
I don’t have the right configuration of equipment to use an app like this, but does anyone know why this needs to be a service-driven app? What piece of functionality requires a server to track your health?
Motorola needs to hurry up and release their GrapheneOS devices, I need a new phone soon(TM) (next year or two) and I refuse to give google money to buy hardware to avoid Google.
+1, I'm pretty happy with my used Pixel, but I feel that buying used is still supporting the manufacturer somewhat. People are more likely to buy another if they got a good price for their old one. And you're driving up used prices which may contribute to others buying new. I don't have a rigorous understanding of this though, would be interesting to see an economist's take.
An error? It's useful to know if/when an app wants to access the Internet. So if an app says it's local only you can disable network permissions. Trust but verify.
geo-positioning, maps, way-finding, directions, time of day, calendar, lunar cycle, calculator, notes, language translation, calculator, games, contacts, etc.
I'm assuming the question should be further refined to "why does the service need to know the data". The things that you mention could be done with the service only having the encrypted blob.
Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.
Better revenue model? Pushing some data to the server, serving ads to the app, reselling demographic data, etc all allow for more revenue than just the price of installation.
There are almost certainly other apps in the space that don’t need a server, don’t phone home to Meta, and are lower priced, but they probably aren’t as good at marketing.
From my experience in the startup world, I would wager that this developer probably wanted to track marketing campaign installs (Meta library is required to close the loop on Facebook/Instagram ad conversions after app install) or wanted a feature from some Meta library they integrated but didn’t realize or care about the consequences.
My partner uses the app this article is about (Flo) and I have an account there too in order for her to share the data with me.
I guess you could do it with some sort of P2P sync with cryptography involved locally instead, and/or E2E for stuff sent via the servers. Kind of surprised me they didn't have E2E already, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
Computers are useful tools that do useful things for people. It is reasonable for people to want to use them to do things they find useful. They don't have to function like spy devices, but we've chosen to highly reward the people who have turned them into spy devices, so they do. We could choose to do something else with them instead. For example we could pass & enforce privacy regulations so they cannot function as spy devices. Or we could wheel out the guillotines so there are appropriate consequences for the creeps and sociopaths who choose to build and work at places like Facebook. Whichever, I'm flexible.
Like notes apps, reminder apps, etc, data from almost everything we do on phone is saved in cloud.
That data is their business fundamental. Same with this app also.
If we didn't have these shitty mobile OS ecosystems, we would have sensible apps to do that. But people then throw something up about "modern" security in operation systems. As if this data exfiltration isn't more or less the worst case of a security problem.
Not being a women, I've always wondered what insight the app gives regardless of data traveling to a server... does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app (like Apple's default Notes)?
If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
I wonder if you would ask the same thing about any number of apps - like fitness trackers, mood trackers, supplement trackers, online diary apps, task trackers, etc? You don't even need a notes app - you could just carry a notebook around or email notes to yourself.
As for why people may want to track menstrual cycles specifically, it is because bodies can be greatly influenced by what phase of the menstrual cycle we are in. From regular physical and mood changes to disorders like PMDD. The different parts of the cycle can also impact ideal exercise and even food choices for some. There are women and couples who gain insights (and often useful predictions) into how their moods coincide with menstrual phases, and that is much easier to track in a dedicated app designed to do so (which can also flag cycle irregularities, bleeding variation, or other changes), just as with other purpose-built applications. All of that is before we even get to the whole fertility tracking thing. One such app is a certified birth control method in my country. Tracking periods in a notes app is not.
Like most data entry software there’s nothing that unstructured notes (or paper) can’t handle.
The main useful feature of the apps (or Apple Health’s tracker which is entirely adequate) is that it sends reminders on the estimated period start date, and then a few days afterwards if you haven’t recorded the end date.
Even “regular” periods often aren’t perfectly regular, or can become irregular when they were regular. (Which is often very important health information.)
It also automatically calculates median period length and typical variation/range.
All unnecessary for some people but very useful for others.
> median period length and typical variation/range.
This was what my partner found useful to share with her doctor while trying to figure out a medical issue. Of course it could have been done typing dates and notes into excel, and manually creating charts, but the chance that she (or most people) would consistently follow that workflow (pun not intended, but I like it) is nil.
> If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
You probably don't need to use it if your cycle is completely regular and it doesn't really impact your daily life, but it's not as common as you might think: about 10% of women have PCOS, which is the leading cause of oligomenorrhea; about 10% have endometriosis, which often causes debilitating pain and irregular periods (with a small overlap with PCOS population); 20% to 30% live with PMS - and that's only the portion that has clinically significant symptoms. Even if you were lucky enough to avoid all of these, your cycle length will change as you age, gain or lose weight, and inevitably reach menopause.
Still, you'll have to at least mark the dates. Someone here in the comments compared it to tracking completely optional fitness metrics like sleep or steps, but period data is not really in the same bucket. Just as an illustration: it's hard to see a doctor without being asked "when was your last period?" or "any chance you might be pregnant?", no matter what brought you into the office. In fact, it is such a common experience that it became a subject of many jokes [1]. Also, if you only rely on your memory, you might not notice if/when you do experience changes, some of which might be medically significant.
But let's say you've already decided to track your data somehow.
> what does the app give [...] does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app?
Valid question. Some people do just use notes, especially when they don't experience any problems and don't care much about when their next period is coming. But for many others, there are plenty of valid use cases:
1. Reminders for ovulation and next periods. The app can also remind you to enter the data if it thinks you should've had a period but you didn't enter anything.
2. Sharing with your partner. You could, theoretically, write it in a shared document or hand over your paper notebook in person, but it's much easier to see this type of data in a calendar rather than do mental math every time. Having this option gets even more important if you are trying to conceive and track fertility windows.
3. Not having to do the aforementioned mental math is also convenient for the woman herself. A lot of women, even completely healthy ones, experience an array of various unpleasant symptoms in the luteal phase, as well as changes in mood, physical and even cognitive performance during the cycle. It's just really useful to be able to quickly see the calendar and have an idea of what to expect while making your plans (for example, people might want to adjust their workout routines, book a vacation on a more convenient date, or avoid taking extra responsibilities when they know they are going to feel shitty).
And now for those who were not as lucky.
> If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
It does! Though surprisingly, a lot of apps, including Flo, are still abysmally bad at this: they either give you a median of past cycles, at best unhelpfully telling you that your periods are "late," or require you to enter lots of sensitive and subjective data daily to get useful predictions. It is well-known in medical literature that there are other metrics like resting heart rate and skin temperature that are predictive of different phases, especially when they are combined with other data. I've always wondered why the integration with consumer wearables that track a lot of those indicators with good-enough precision is not commonplace. As far as I know, only Apple Health's cycle tracking feature, Samsung Health, and Oura Ring do that among the major players. A few others like Natural Cycles use temperature, but they are all focused on fertility & conception.
That said, using an app like Drip that allows you to export data freely in a universal format can be incredibly valuable for personal analysis. You can find patterns in your data to make your own "predictor" or determine whether certain medications or lifestyle changes were effective. It can also be helpful at your next doctor visit.
It doesn’t? You could easily install the tracker on the client app, no need to do it server side. In fact I bet the app in question (Flo) was doing the upload to Meta client-side.
I'm guessing P2P technology isn't really sufficiently easy for developers yet, so when you have two users using an app that are supposed to share something between the two, most of us default to building server-side services. That + the "dynamic" list of articles and "help" Flo offer I'm guessing is the main reason for them having servers in the first place.
I have actually been playing around with scoping a privacy first version of these tracking apps that store all the data locally with optional sync. It's technically possible, but there's very little in the way of revenue generation there. So it's same issue as always, capitalism corrupts.
Haven't we known this for years? There's been thorough documentation of the violation of privacy in period tracking apps as far back as 2021. It's even been written about when it comes to Meta.
Meta ‘eavesdropping’ on Flo exposes how period apps are a data… | TBIJ https://share.google/qYTopS5goSKE0Dyna
I don't really give a shit at this point. In Toronto it's legal to even record into your condo neighbor's unit 24/7 and livestream your recording to the Internet, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. It has been demonstrated that nobody will enforce anything.
At this point I am a privacy nihilist, and I expect all information about anyone to be exploited all the time. Everyone should do the same.
I live in America so I can’t speak to Canadian laws, but what you’re describing is the same in the States. If you are in public, or can be seen by someone who is in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It’s how paparazzi work.
- around since 2023. Last updated 2 years ago.
- iOS
- Swift
EDIT: Someone else pointed out this closed-source alternative that got a 92% by ORCHA: https://www.my28x.com/
I think the biggest thing I'd like to see is a data format standard defined. You should be able to "take your data with you" and go anywhere you like. If you decide an app is unethical or if your favorite OSS app stops being updated, it should be simple to switch. Many apps let you export your data. Maybe someone can make a converter between popular proprietary apps and a common data structure spec
Are you joking? There's loads of trivial links. Most obviously: it's stopped (pregnancy, menopause) and therefore so too will stop purchases of certain 'female hygiene products'.
And will be targeted by an avalanche of childbirth-related ads... Isn't this an old story now? We've already seen this happening even before evidence of women's health data being sold to ad companies...
I think even Flo's behaviour is not news, but it is worth distinguishing I think between more organic and generic targeting behaviour based on say searches for health advice or other products, and selling 'first-class' health data as it were which is a much stronger signal and feels more personal.
I can't accept that premise. They'll take any revenue they can get, including reselling that same data to Palantir or to RFK Jr's health department. Did you skip several periods and then suddenly start having them again? Sounds like you've had an illegal abortion. SWAT raid on your home, incoming. And so on.
Yikes - selling "When did I last Orgasm" to Mark Zuckerberg's team seems like an undesirable "leak" of information.
.. To be clear, "wired app to standard ad-tech surveillance plumbing, sending concepts like user logged period and pregnancy mode entered, through its pipes, to improve ad revenues through Meta's targeting platform" .. ad-events .. this is the kind of behavior that happened, in plain-ish speaking terms, per what I read in my non-expert capacity.
Q: (answered) Now I want to know who runs (ran?) Flo - can we find their Board of Directors & C-level people on LinkedIn to profile what kind of industries lead to this kind of (I believe) privacy violating behaviors? It's a biased question on my part, as Correlation is not Causality! Onwards ..
My limited, biased, AI-driven research suggests the violating behavior ran from June 2016 through February 2019, and that generally the Company was designed to be consumer-app with subscriptions and is healthcare-adjacent, targeting an unregulated non-HIPPA market.
- INVESTORS = consumer subscription apps with ad-driven growth loops
- BUSINESS MODEL =
(1) free or freemium consumer apps where
(2) growth depends on paid acquisition through Meta/Google/TikTok ad platforms, which
(3) requires sending conversion events back to those platforms to optimize ad spend, and
(4) the SDKs that do this are designed by ad networks to hoover up everything by default.
- EXECUTIVE =
* No Privacy / Data Protection C-level officers during violating period
Why would anyone think that a non-HIPPA compliant app would keep medical information private to the level of security needed for medical data? Flo has definitely breached user trust, but that trust seems misplaced from the get-go.
People are used to living in highly regulated markets. When they go to a grocery store to buy lettuce, people don't stop to ask "what regulatory regime is this lettuce being sold under?". They just trust that food being sold in a food store will meet our societal standards for food. I can go to Amazon and order a raw steak for delivery, and still trust it will meet standards.
The situation with wellness apps is that they are a product that are designed specifically to exist outside of the regulatory regime that people associate with them.
>Why would anyone think that a non-HIPPA compliant app would keep medical information private to the level of security needed for medical data?
because lots of people dont know what HIPPA is, and (naively to us more familiar with tech) assume that a medical-related app on a curated app store would be safe for medical-related stuff.
You're right, though; it's much more limited than people think. During COVID people claimed everything violated HIPAA (masks, vaccine requirements, testing), but it only applies in a very narrow subset of patient/provider relationships.
Very much so. Also ironically, as a healthcare provider (paramedic), HIPAA expressly allows me to get your healthcare information without your consent (as needed for your care). A lot of facilities have you sign paperwork to explicitly authorize sharing, but that's really just a CYA.
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
100% reasonable (and often necessary - pill shopping, psychiatric concerns, etc. And not irony in the Act itself, more people's perception of its intent.
I agree that it's not and never should be a free-for-all with PHI just "because you can".
But if I, as an EMS provider, are treating someone for, say, an overdose, it is rather germane to my treatment of you that you have a history of suicidal ideation or attempts, even if you'd rather I wasn't able to gather that information from another provider's records (because you'd "rather not" be subject to a mandated hold/evaluation if it appears that your overdose was intentional).
I don't need to know, and don't care, if you're transitioning and I'm seeing you for a seizure, for example, it's not relevant. If you're unconscious and I need to see if I can see history or diagnoses or etc., as I'm determining the risk of an intervention to perform on you, then, I may discover that detail, again, in the course of your treatment.
It's not a blanket "I don't care whether you consent or not, I'm pulling your records from the EHR. Sucks to be you."
People just wanna track stuff, they don't really look into is something HIPPA compliant or read the ToS. App store push, recommendation, word of mouth are what makes the app like this spread, not really details HIPPA compliance.
I don't have a period, so I'm not the best person to do it, but there really needs to be a solid FOSS alternative to flo. If GNU had more women, it'd probably already exist
There are a plethora of open-source implementations available on F-Droid. They need to be looked at for privacy before choosing one, but there are completely offline ones.
Drip has a paradoxical flaw: by trying to be extremely inclusive and making a "gender-neutral" app (without the colour pink) to include trans people, it discourages some people from using it. At least, my friend told me she thought the design was ugly and was looking for a "cute" app, so she ended up using Flo instead of Drip despite my many warnings.
I think FLOSS apps often forget that not everyone is a developer or a nerd who prioritizes privacy and ethics over design, which is a real problem since people end up using proprietary apps that data-mine them.
That sounds not so much as a flaw, as a conscious product decision. And to be honest, doesn't sound like a bad one, not every app needs to work or look the same way, as long as people have choices, they can be responsible for the choices they make. If someone wants a safer but boring app or if someone wants a cute "who gives a fuck about privacy" app, both should be fine.
The problem is that there is literally no other free and open-source app to track your periods, so you're forced to use some proprietary piece of shit that sells all possible medical information about its users.
There seem to be lots of FOSS period tracking apps available, look at the other comments in this submission!
What seems to be lacking, is a FOSS period-tracking app that also lets you share stuff with a partner, which is the reason me and my partner use Flo in the first place.
The government does NOT let people have choices in many cases. People should NOT be forced to choose between medical privacy and potential prosecution.
That your comment even implied that would be acceptable in this context is appalling.
I don't know where you got "the government" from, all I'm saying is that apps should be allowed to have cute designs or boring designs, based on their own judgement, and that people should be allowed to freely choose between those. No one should be FORCED to chose anything, I agree, and I didn't imply anything like that.
Not quite! While trans women obviously don't have menstrual cycles a good chunk of the population suffer from period-like symptoms/PMS just due to similar hormonal fluctuations.
There are multiple factors like dosage and specific hormone regimen (some do monotherapy while others do estrogen and a anti-androgen), but generally yes
Of course, but treating transgender men like you would a cisgender woman with all the same gendered expectations is both incredibly disrespectful if done on purpose and humiliating for someone who very much does not want to be treated as a woman despite having a period that most likely already makes them very uncomfortable and dysphoric
> only biological women have periods
generally, yes, but there are so many edge cases there with intersex people that it is far easier and more inclusive to just say roughly 50 percent of the human population has periods and avoid having to deal with the million asterisks that come with that statement
50% of the human population will at some point in their life have periods, perhaps; but presumably (due to childhood and menopause) less than 50% of the human population has recently experienced a period.
There is no intersex person waiting to jump out and yell accusatory things at you because you didn't include sufficient asterisks or you said statements that are 99.9999% true.
> There is no intersex person waiting to jump out and yell accusatory things at you because you didn't include sufficient asterisks or you said statements that are 99.9999% true.
I would assume that the app isn’t pink because the devs aren’t worried about getting yelled at. The number of intersex people is minuscule compared to the amount of folks that have Opinions about them online.
I don't quite understand your point. Is Drip non-pink to include trans men? That sounds really far fetched to me. And your friend found it ugly because it's not pink? Design is obviously subjectivity and perhaps your friend prefers the color pink, but has any of this actually anything to do with trans people and inclusiveness?
What's your reasoning for the conclusion of the app looking the way it does due to this and not due to the developer just subjectively preferring this design?
In the app description: "Not another cute, pink app. drip. is designed with gender inclusivity in mind"
So it's a perfectly conscious choice, and that's exactly what turns off some women who might prefer a cute, pink app. I have nothing against inclusivity, quite the opposite, but in this case they could offer two themes rather than imposing an app that isn't "cute". Even as a man, you can prefer cute things.
took me a while to figure out what you were even responding to:
> Not another cute, pink app. drip. is designed with gender inclusivity in mindful
so a FOSS community should bimboify their app because your friend wants her data pinkwashed more than she wants her data safe? sounds like a her problem but she could always fork herself
My friend isn't a developer; on the contrary, she's pretty tech illiterate. She has very little patience for testing 10 different apps. I think it would be possible to have two themes: a neutral one, and a pink and cute one.
I seriously doubt that the vast majority of women would avoid using a period tracking app just because it's not pink and stereotypically girly. Frankly, I find the notion vaguely offensive.
iOS/watchOS has had period tracking functionality with completely sterile design and people use it just fine.
https://www.my28x.com/
I recently heard a talk from this founder. It's free and local, but don't think it's OSS.
They have a high ORCHA rating, but waiting to see if they keep their business model this way
I don't know how many more examples people need to see of big tech not respecting privacy... it's just becoming a farce now. Big tech tracking woman's cycles? Of course they are. (sigh) If this doesn't gross people out enough to seriously pursue alternatives, I literally don't know what will.
I think that kind of thinking is similar to the "both sides" stuff in politics. There's a meaningful difference in trustworthiness between different options.
For instance, if you need to track your period, the built in iOS apps are secure, especially if you're using advanced icloud encryption.
The trouble is that it's literally impossible to tell what applications are trustworthy and what applications are not, or whether they'll remain trustworthy over time. So you have to treat them all as untrustworthy. It's a fair rule of thumb because the majority of them can't be trusted.
I'll make a period tracker for you for 5 bucks a month. You won't buy it, because it costs 5 bucks a month. So I'll have to find alternative monetisation strategies.
Why would me giving you 5 bucks a month assure you didn't also sell all of the data from the period tracker app? That's money you'd just be leaving on the table.
At this point, if you don't trust that they share your data with third parties with the AI tools available and open-source LLMs, just vibe-code your own health apps and keep them stored on a Mac mini or something else for the female devs here.
This is one more reason sector-specific privacy expectations probably need to be harder-coded. Hoping every consumer app will independently exercise restraint has not gone especially well.
its crazy to me that Flo is used so widely, as its started by Russian men and their treatment of data has bee public for a while, it just hasnt spread fast enough. I know theres at least one other option called Calessa (http://Calessa.app)
That one is good I think. It's German and adheres to EU privacy laws. The main FLOSS one is called drip. Has some funding from the German government as well as Mozilla
Period tracking is a perfect use case for homomorphic encryption, so there's a server that holds the data and can operate on it, without knowing the data itself.
"Flo, through the Flo App, unlawfully shared users’ sensitive health data – including menstrual cycle, ovulation, and pregnancy-related information – with third parties such as Meta, Google, and Flurry for their own commercial us"
If the app sold the data to Meta through extremely automated Meta platforms. Doesn't the bulk of legal liability and social backlash lie on the app instead of on Meta?
Like sure if a company is caught buying stolen goods, maybe they could tighten up due diligence, but the actual thief is the main culprit.
This one seems clear cut as a HIPAA violation. Glad to hear that interpretation was upheld.
However, regardless, we really need to just kill the data broker business model.
Speaking as someone who implemented GDPR for my startup when the law first came into effect, there were certainly rough edges.
But the core premise that you simply cannot sell user data to sub-processors without consent is a powerful one that I believe would fix a lot of broken things in the US system.
(Not least because the USG buys private data that would be unconstitutional for it to directly collect, but also things like the incentives for your cell phone provider to sell your location data to advertisers.)
Seriously, we have a country where a large fraction of our ad spend is for services that promise to remove your private data from data brokers. We could literally just pass laws so companies could not do this.
TL;DW: HIPAA was actually created to allow insurance companies to share patient data without having to get patient consent. Before HIPAA, data was more fractured and less commonly shared. The only privacy protections it offers is, e.g., your doctor not giving your data to your boss. But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data (everything from health startups to insurance companies to hospitals)
Reminds me of this Seinfeld episode when Elaine was marked as "difficult" in her chart, and then she couldn't get a single doctor to see her. She wasn't allowed to see her chart or edit it after that. As soon as she got to a new clinic, they would receive a phone call from another doctor warning them not to treat her.
> But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data
Somewhat. They are allowed to access it "for treatment purposes", not just to nose around out of curiosity.
I found myself explaining this to a number of my patients (I used to be a paramedic) who were irate about disclosures they'd made to their therapist, doctor, etc., that they had said they didn't want revealed to other providers (but were actually germane to their care).
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
One problem is all the data breaches it encourages. Data breaches are already bad enough with the providers I actually use without 1000s of random companies having access.
Does anyone happen to know if Meta and Google have ever recovered these judgements from the app developers? All of the industry terms of service specifically forbid SDK licensees from sending sensitive personal data to the platforms, and they require the licensee to indemnify the platform against any judgement that arises from violating those terms. See Meta's statement on this verdict, which seems pretty reasonable to me. This 100% looks like the fault of the app developer:
“User privacy is important to Meta, which is why we do not want health or other sensitive information and why our terms prohibit developers from sending any.” Meta maintains that any transmission of sensitive health data is due to a failure to comply with its terms of use.
That doesn't answer the question. It just restates the problem. Why aren't they doing diligence on what they're accepting from their business partners, or what types of partners they're working with? There's no reason they couldn't know the company deals with health data and place it under additional scrutiny.
I will say, with codex/cc access and a free weekend you could make an app that covers like 99% of this app’s purpose. The harder part would be the art/making it cutesy, as some other commenters have pointed out. Plain SwiftUI or compose just isn’t eye catching enough
There are four open source period tracking apps on F-droid. I didn't do a full investigation of the source code, but unless your data is being uploaded outside the app (e.g. for backups), I feel safe assuming it will stay local only.
It sounds like the real solution to this is to be able to control permissions at an OS level for network per app, as you would be able to do if you had root access. I have no idea why regular Android distros don't allow you to do this, it seems like a really sensible thing to expose in app settings given the permissions model of Android.
If you're paying for a subscription, the company might sell your data. If you're using a commercial service for free, they are certainly selling your data.
Having said that, you're right to be suspicious of commercial services, even that you pay for. Someone can found a startup with a strong commitment to customer privacy and the best of intentions, but a few acquisitions or near bankruptcies later, those commitments will go out the window.
Relevant to this case, since they have a free version and premium one, they would probably just sell data from both sets of customers. It would be leaving money on the table otherwise, right?
The small chance that they might go out of their way to not sell premium users data doesn't seem worth much.
Less a f-u-view, more a f-u-world, the above is pragmatic advice about the actual IRL challenges of keeping data secure.
Further, a view that ignores many real world digital data risks faced by those considered to be useful targets; eg: compromised supply chains delivering "pre hacked" hardware with discreet wifi chips or hidden out of band comms, etc.
> It seems like we can’t just necessarily leave it up to companies – or their ragtag teams of crackpot lawyers rewriting privacy policies every few months – to keep our private data private.
It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to. Not everything needs to be an app. All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
I've never used Flo specifically, so I don't know what kind of data analysis it has available, but period data is the #1 most useful health data to have an app crunch for you, and "your period starts tomorrow" is a pretty darn useful notification to get.
Most of the women I know well enough to know this about them track and predict the onset of their next period without needing an application. It isn't exactly rocket science.
1-2 generations? give an advanced anything to anyone with no true knowledge of how to do it without the tool and you'll have people fully dependent in hours.
kids today cannot navigate without turn-by-turn. nobody looks at the map to get names of major streets, they just blindly follow the directions. I learned how to navigate as a kid just by being bored and staring out the window and being able to recognize things. Now, kids don't even look out the window as they keep their heads down and eyes glued to a screen.
This is a strawman argument. Nobody is arguing that period apps are a necessity. Women have been tracking our periods without computers since prehistoric times. Women were doing rocket science calculations before computers, for that matter. Of course we can do without period apps. But they're more useful than any other health tracking device or app that I can think of.
We're using Flo specifically, mostly for sharing stuff like "her period starts tomorrow" to the both of us, she doesn't really need a notification for that :)
I'm not sure I understand your argument. It's important enough that she has it set up to share that data to both of you, but it's so unimportant she doesn't need a notification for it?
Yes, it is useful for me as a partner to know, ideally without having to ask her, and not important for her to be notified, since without the notification she'll notice it anyways sooner or later...
I'm sorry but this is bordering on parody to me. The way she would notice it "sooner or later" is by her bleeding on her clothes and possibly even furniture. In what world is it important for you to just know about it and somehow not important for her to avoid that?
> The way she would notice it "sooner or later" is by her bleeding on her clothes and possibly even furniture.
No, many can feel it beforehand, and you notice it when you go to the bathroom before as well, as certain things change their properties slightly, it's not a "nothing" phase and then "floods out of your body".
It's borderline parody how little education there is for males when it comes to things like this.
I appreciate that you've educated yourself about these issues, but let me assure you from decades of personal experience and conversations with other women that it is useful to be notified when your period is going to start.
More "experienced" it than anything, everyone is different of course which is why I'm not saying that everyone needs/don't need it. Thank you but no need for any assurances, my partner lives with me and shares her experience and thoughts about it freely, and I'll continue to listen to what she says she needs/doesn't need :)
Hm. Well, congratulations on being the first man to mansplain menstruation to me. Somebody already knocked out breastfeeding years ago. Pregnancy is still up for grabs, if any men out there want to take a whack at telling me what that's like.
I'm not even explaining anything, just telling you there are other perspectives out there, and sharing my partner's perspective. No need to try to paint yourself as a victim here, and I'm sorry if you took it as "This is how you feel according to me", I was just trying to explain another persons perspective.
Even if it was a requirement, doctors do not generally have legal authority to compel action. Hell, the average doctor would probably agree that the average patient hardly ever does what they’re told…
They need to make an example out of these companies. If your whole business model is built around handling sensitive data, and you are caught shipping off that data to brokers, you should be liquidated or at least fined to within an inch of bankruptcy, as basically all of your profits are a sham.
There needs to be penalties that piece the "limited liability" because otherwise it's just "pay to get away with it" as we currently have.
I've been for a "corporate death penalty" (if companies are people, they can be executed) which would result in the shareholders losing everything along with executives being perp-walked.
Not to side with this behaviour, but I think if you consent to it in the Ts & Cs then it's legal. And that makes sense - otherwise how else do you agree to things or not agree to them?
The point of laws is that T&Cs don't matter if the law has something to say. If the law e.g. were to criminalize sharing health information in this way, then it doesn't matter if the users agreed; you still go to prison for doing it.
What does thumbing their noses mean? They have been paying while continuing their behavior, or not paying at all?
The first seems like it could be resolved with an escalating fine schedule, and the second could be mitigated by requiring Apple/Google to remove it from the app store (one of the rare cases walled gardens are on consumers' side).
"While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025."
Why is it a waste? If you want to provide an app, one should follow the law and the regulations. It isn't the wild west (and even that had regulations).
This is a bit of a revealing phrasing, but I'll bite anyway. If someone shot themselves in the toe because they were being careless, am I blaming the victim by saying that they shouldn't have been careless? Not everything is cops and robbers.
Nobody is blaming victims, please stop these wild fabulations. OP meant that you can't trust app owners especially long term, as you write its worse than wild west, literally nobody.gives.a.fuck. till they are dragged to the court, then they fight, dissolve company, still sell the data, start a new one and rinse and repeat. People are simply way more greedy than moral on average if there is any lesson in current times.
Look at say zuckenberg - a typical sociopath lying again and again through his nose with big grin just to get what he wants (ie scandals how FB employees go to DB to spy on their exes or enemies is popping up for 10 years at least and there is no stop, every time there is another assurance how it can't be done now blablabla... and thats just specific meta employees).
Nobody likes that, but just sitting and waiting for almighty regulators while blindly trusting apps in good faith to do their jobs is... not working much, is it. Be smart, adapt to real environment out there, not some wishful thinking. In parallel push for change as much as you can, vote with wallet and your time. Once sought-for paradise comes then feel free to use anything anyhow. At least that seems like smarter approach to me.
So add liability for the buyers of the data or any services derived from the data (e.g. targeted ads). Make it so large advertisers demand audits showing privacy laws are being followed. Also have personal criminal liability for people building and maintaining systems that collect, store, or process data for illegal purposes. Executives, PMs, engineers, the whole lot. Put them in prison if they continue.
> All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
That isn't what's happening. The regulations don't get little niche cases added to them, they're writen to be generally applicable to all niches.
> It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to.
"Just don't use the computer if you don't want companies to rat you out to the fascist government that'll imprison or kill you for having a miscarriage" is a ridiculous victim-blaming position.
It's the practical reality of a fascist government that they won't enact privacy laws. And yes, women really shouldn't be using period tracking apps in the US, or made by the US. But that doesn't mean privacy laws are some "silly waste of my tax money".
It's not a "medical requirement" except for the many many many cases where it is. Similarly, this position extends to literally everything. Nothing "needs to be an app". But unless we want to pack up and discard the entire software industry, it really ought to be better about privacy like this.
> "Just don't use the computer if you don't want companies to rat you out to the fascist government that'll imprison or kill you for having a miscarriage" is a ridiculous victim-blaming position.
No-one's saying this, and based on your wording you seem to be trained on some very predictable and narrow corpuses.
> It's not a "medical requirement" except for the many many many cases where it is.
Flo is not a medical device. It's not prescribed. It's just a consumer app, no different medically or legally to writing your feelings diary into Google Keep. If you have an actual medical device app then this would be a problem.
No-one was saying it explicitly. I merely took what you said and re-stated what it concretely meant in the real world.
The generalization to "all computers" is an assumption, but you appear to maintain a narrow view of what is "medically necessary" and just now generalize to things like dairies, so I believe I am correct in asserting that you would generalize this to all "non-essential" software.
If the app could make another $0.05 selling your location to kidnapping gangs, they'd do it. There's no such thing as an app that cares about your privacy or your interests.
That's what I'm really trying to convey to many people (I work in privacy products) but people keep talking to me about "trust" which is non-sense, I keep arguing that if the data is on the server of someone, you must always assume that they'll use it somehow, it's a bit ridiculous imo to think otherwise, imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
> imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
I expect all humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. I acknowledge that many people will likely fail to meet that expectation, quite often I'm sure. But I'm never going to accept or become an apologist for this asshattery.
It's wrong to violate the privacy and dignity of other people. The correct response when you see people hurting others is not to make up an excuse about "business need", instead some anger, disappointment, and loud condemnation is required.
Stop making excuses for those hurting others so they can make money.
Yes, I agree that it's wrong, my point is really about the data itself being in their servers. Let's be real, a service nowadays DO have the choice to enable client-side encryption or methodology to be unable to consult data themselves, so any company that chose against that during development phase might have eventual motives of processing the data, my point is really about the blind trust from users which is just wrong from a security standpoint, every trust step added that you can't verify is just "faith" at this point, not security.
Term of services are irrelevant as they are breached all the time, major companies are getting fined all the time for it, we must rely on cryptography, not human trust and people needs to stop being surprised the moment they learn that the data they accepted to leave in cleartext is used, that would be a first step toward forcing the change and using proper security standards.
Want a useful action? Let's change the law to force cryptography regarding user data, attestation, SGX or whatever method (there is plenty), that would be a great start, the fact that in 2026 it's still legal to process user chats in plaintext is mindblowing.
There is such a thing. FOSS.
Unfortunately, companies like Apple (and soon Google as well) are making this unnecessarily hard in their phone ecosystems.
Well, perhaps they make verifying it hard.. but what is stopping you from publishing an app in the app store, while also hosting the source code for anyone to see, and use? 99 bucks a year?
Who is gonna make sure that what I put in github is exactly what I am pushing to the store.
reproducible builds, ideally. f-droid supports this.
It is actually a perfectly practical choice to completely ignore those ecosystems. I am the founder and active engineer at two companies and two large open source projects and have a family, travel a lot, and have an active social life in Silicon Valley.
I also do not use any Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft products and exclusively use open source software for all of my work.
It turns out none of this is incompatible, everyone just convinces themselves it is.
Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers). If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?
First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience.
Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you.
Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want.
From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home.
Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi.
Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own.
Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day.
At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want.
People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened.
Do you have a blog post or similar that describes how you do this?
see my reply to sibling comment
Do you have only a dumb phone?
I do own android devices for development and testing, but I do not have a cell phone plan and I do not carry any electronics when leaving home unless my explicit goal is working away from home, in which case I bring a laptop.
They'd only do it as long as the risk of getting caught and the punishment when caught made it worth it.
If the authorities that are supposed to enforce GDPR (and other data protection laws around the world) were doing their job, app makers would be a lot more careful with what they embed and what data they send where. Because these authorities don't seem to have been doing anything useful, it's now so normalized that you could probably send a $20M fine to every major app and be right about it.
Haven’t Apple introduced a lot of privacy controls for their users? Seems like some apps do care.
I don’t have the right configuration of equipment to use an app like this, but does anyone know why this needs to be a service-driven app? What piece of functionality requires a server to track your health?
The spying part requires a server.
If you use GrapheneOS, you can enable or disable internet access for each app.
"If you use GrapheneOS, you can enable or disable internet access for each app."
This can also be done on Android with certain apps such as Netguard and PCAPDroid
(Using either a blacklist or whitelist approach)
Disabling internet access is not necessarily a hard requirement to stop this type of spying
Controlling what DNS data apps can access, if any, will usually suffice
Motorola needs to hurry up and release their GrapheneOS devices, I need a new phone soon(TM) (next year or two) and I refuse to give google money to buy hardware to avoid Google.
Buy a used Pixel - it's better for the environment, anyway
+1, I'm pretty happy with my used Pixel, but I feel that buying used is still supporting the manufacturer somewhat. People are more likely to buy another if they got a good price for their old one. And you're driving up used prices which may contribute to others buying new. I don't have a rigorous understanding of this though, would be interesting to see an economist's take.
> If you use GrapheneOS, you can enable or disable internet access for each app.
Not sure what information you're expecting the app in question to surface if you disable internet access for it.
An error? It's useful to know if/when an app wants to access the Internet. So if an app says it's local only you can disable network permissions. Trust but verify.
Locally stored info
geo-positioning, maps, way-finding, directions, time of day, calendar, lunar cycle, calculator, notes, language translation, calculator, games, contacts, etc.
I'm not familiar with this app, but a service lets you do potentially nice things like cross device sync and sharing observations with trusted others.
I'm assuming the question should be further refined to "why does the service need to know the data". The things that you mention could be done with the service only having the encrypted blob.
Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.
Better revenue model? Pushing some data to the server, serving ads to the app, reselling demographic data, etc all allow for more revenue than just the price of installation.
There are almost certainly other apps in the space that don’t need a server, don’t phone home to Meta, and are lower priced, but they probably aren’t as good at marketing.
From my experience in the startup world, I would wager that this developer probably wanted to track marketing campaign installs (Meta library is required to close the loop on Facebook/Instagram ad conversions after app install) or wanted a feature from some Meta library they integrated but didn’t realize or care about the consequences.
My partner uses the app this article is about (Flo) and I have an account there too in order for her to share the data with me.
I guess you could do it with some sort of P2P sync with cryptography involved locally instead, and/or E2E for stuff sent via the servers. Kind of surprised me they didn't have E2E already, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
Well... They share their data with you and a bunch of adtech companies...
Or, you know, she could just track it without any app at all and share it with you in person.
You could also be snarky without internet access
Computers are useful tools that do useful things for people. It is reasonable for people to want to use them to do things they find useful. They don't have to function like spy devices, but we've chosen to highly reward the people who have turned them into spy devices, so they do. We could choose to do something else with them instead. For example we could pass & enforce privacy regulations so they cannot function as spy devices. Or we could wheel out the guillotines so there are appropriate consequences for the creeps and sociopaths who choose to build and work at places like Facebook. Whichever, I'm flexible.
> we've chosen to highly reward
No, investors have.
This is an important point.
Society did not choose freemium, it did not choose high fructose corn syrup. It was content with the products straight, the way they were.
Like notes apps, reminder apps, etc, data from almost everything we do on phone is saved in cloud. That data is their business fundamental. Same with this app also.
From an user perspective, easier data sync and access between devices
If we didn't have these shitty mobile OS ecosystems, we would have sensible apps to do that. But people then throw something up about "modern" security in operation systems. As if this data exfiltration isn't more or less the worst case of a security problem.
Not being a women, I've always wondered what insight the app gives regardless of data traveling to a server... does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app (like Apple's default Notes)?
If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
I wonder if you would ask the same thing about any number of apps - like fitness trackers, mood trackers, supplement trackers, online diary apps, task trackers, etc? You don't even need a notes app - you could just carry a notebook around or email notes to yourself.
As for why people may want to track menstrual cycles specifically, it is because bodies can be greatly influenced by what phase of the menstrual cycle we are in. From regular physical and mood changes to disorders like PMDD. The different parts of the cycle can also impact ideal exercise and even food choices for some. There are women and couples who gain insights (and often useful predictions) into how their moods coincide with menstrual phases, and that is much easier to track in a dedicated app designed to do so (which can also flag cycle irregularities, bleeding variation, or other changes), just as with other purpose-built applications. All of that is before we even get to the whole fertility tracking thing. One such app is a certified birth control method in my country. Tracking periods in a notes app is not.
> fertility tracking
This. Life is busy and some people just want an app to tell them when they're ovulating.
Like most data entry software there’s nothing that unstructured notes (or paper) can’t handle.
The main useful feature of the apps (or Apple Health’s tracker which is entirely adequate) is that it sends reminders on the estimated period start date, and then a few days afterwards if you haven’t recorded the end date.
Even “regular” periods often aren’t perfectly regular, or can become irregular when they were regular. (Which is often very important health information.)
It also automatically calculates median period length and typical variation/range.
All unnecessary for some people but very useful for others.
> median period length and typical variation/range.
This was what my partner found useful to share with her doctor while trying to figure out a medical issue. Of course it could have been done typing dates and notes into excel, and manually creating charts, but the chance that she (or most people) would consistently follow that workflow (pun not intended, but I like it) is nil.
> If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
You probably don't need to use it if your cycle is completely regular and it doesn't really impact your daily life, but it's not as common as you might think: about 10% of women have PCOS, which is the leading cause of oligomenorrhea; about 10% have endometriosis, which often causes debilitating pain and irregular periods (with a small overlap with PCOS population); 20% to 30% live with PMS - and that's only the portion that has clinically significant symptoms. Even if you were lucky enough to avoid all of these, your cycle length will change as you age, gain or lose weight, and inevitably reach menopause.
Still, you'll have to at least mark the dates. Someone here in the comments compared it to tracking completely optional fitness metrics like sleep or steps, but period data is not really in the same bucket. Just as an illustration: it's hard to see a doctor without being asked "when was your last period?" or "any chance you might be pregnant?", no matter what brought you into the office. In fact, it is such a common experience that it became a subject of many jokes [1]. Also, if you only rely on your memory, you might not notice if/when you do experience changes, some of which might be medically significant.
But let's say you've already decided to track your data somehow.
> what does the app give [...] does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app?
Valid question. Some people do just use notes, especially when they don't experience any problems and don't care much about when their next period is coming. But for many others, there are plenty of valid use cases:
1. Reminders for ovulation and next periods. The app can also remind you to enter the data if it thinks you should've had a period but you didn't enter anything. 2. Sharing with your partner. You could, theoretically, write it in a shared document or hand over your paper notebook in person, but it's much easier to see this type of data in a calendar rather than do mental math every time. Having this option gets even more important if you are trying to conceive and track fertility windows. 3. Not having to do the aforementioned mental math is also convenient for the woman herself. A lot of women, even completely healthy ones, experience an array of various unpleasant symptoms in the luteal phase, as well as changes in mood, physical and even cognitive performance during the cycle. It's just really useful to be able to quickly see the calendar and have an idea of what to expect while making your plans (for example, people might want to adjust their workout routines, book a vacation on a more convenient date, or avoid taking extra responsibilities when they know they are going to feel shitty).
And now for those who were not as lucky.
> If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
It does! Though surprisingly, a lot of apps, including Flo, are still abysmally bad at this: they either give you a median of past cycles, at best unhelpfully telling you that your periods are "late," or require you to enter lots of sensitive and subjective data daily to get useful predictions. It is well-known in medical literature that there are other metrics like resting heart rate and skin temperature that are predictive of different phases, especially when they are combined with other data. I've always wondered why the integration with consumer wearables that track a lot of those indicators with good-enough precision is not commonplace. As far as I know, only Apple Health's cycle tracking feature, Samsung Health, and Oura Ring do that among the major players. A few others like Natural Cycles use temperature, but they are all focused on fertility & conception.
That said, using an app like Drip that allows you to export data freely in a universal format can be incredibly valuable for personal analysis. You can find patterns in your data to make your own "predictor" or determine whether certain medications or lifestyle changes were effective. It can also be helpful at your next doctor visit.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thefemalelead_wendi-aarons-a-...
It doesn’t? You could easily install the tracker on the client app, no need to do it server side. In fact I bet the app in question (Flo) was doing the upload to Meta client-side.
> It doesn’t?
I'm guessing P2P technology isn't really sufficiently easy for developers yet, so when you have two users using an app that are supposed to share something between the two, most of us default to building server-side services. That + the "dynamic" list of articles and "help" Flo offer I'm guessing is the main reason for them having servers in the first place.
I have actually been playing around with scoping a privacy first version of these tracking apps that store all the data locally with optional sync. It's technically possible, but there's very little in the way of revenue generation there. So it's same issue as always, capitalism corrupts.
What’s a server?
Same as any other application, if you lose or change your phone you don't lose data.
The blockchain should have solved this.
The app in question couldn't be bothered to do E2EE, and your solution is a public, immutable database?
Haven't we known this for years? There's been thorough documentation of the violation of privacy in period tracking apps as far back as 2021. It's even been written about when it comes to Meta. Meta ‘eavesdropping’ on Flo exposes how period apps are a data… | TBIJ https://share.google/qYTopS5goSKE0Dyna
I don't really give a shit at this point. In Toronto it's legal to even record into your condo neighbor's unit 24/7 and livestream your recording to the Internet, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. It has been demonstrated that nobody will enforce anything.
At this point I am a privacy nihilist, and I expect all information about anyone to be exploited all the time. Everyone should do the same.
I live in America so I can’t speak to Canadian laws, but what you’re describing is the same in the States. If you are in public, or can be seen by someone who is in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It’s how paparazzi work.
Does that include putting your ear to your neighbor's wall and recording into their private dwelling?
No idea, I’m only speaking to photography
Apathy is a poor response to this. Especially when you tell others to also be apathetic
[drip.](https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io/) [source](https://gitlab.com/bloodyhealth/drip)
Mensinator [source](https://github.com/EmmaTellblom/Mensinator) [Menstrudel](https://menstrudel.app/) [source](https://github.com/J-shw/Menstrudel) [Tyd](https://unobserved.io/tyd/) [source](https://github.com/unobserved-io/tyd) EDIT: Someone else pointed out this closed-source alternative that got a 92% by ORCHA: https://www.my28x.com/I think the biggest thing I'd like to see is a data format standard defined. You should be able to "take your data with you" and go anywhere you like. If you decide an app is unethical or if your favorite OSS app stops being updated, it should be simple to switch. Many apps let you export your data. Maybe someone can make a converter between popular proprietary apps and a common data structure spec
Oops I meant to write that Menstrude has been around since 2025 not 2015
Meta only cares about ad revenue so could they be researching or have discovered a link between buying trends and links to a woman's cycle?
Are you joking? There's loads of trivial links. Most obviously: it's stopped (pregnancy, menopause) and therefore so too will stop purchases of certain 'female hygiene products'.
And will be targeted by an avalanche of childbirth-related ads... Isn't this an old story now? We've already seen this happening even before evidence of women's health data being sold to ad companies...
I think even Flo's behaviour is not news, but it is worth distinguishing I think between more organic and generic targeting behaviour based on say searches for health advice or other products, and selling 'first-class' health data as it were which is a much stronger signal and feels more personal.
a very old story - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
> Meta only cares about ad revenue
I can't accept that premise. They'll take any revenue they can get, including reselling that same data to Palantir or to RFK Jr's health department. Did you skip several periods and then suddenly start having them again? Sounds like you've had an illegal abortion. SWAT raid on your home, incoming. And so on.
Privacyguides has some recs for private health apps (https://www.privacyguides.org/en/health-and-wellness/#menstr...)
Yikes - selling "When did I last Orgasm" to Mark Zuckerberg's team seems like an undesirable "leak" of information.
.. To be clear, "wired app to standard ad-tech surveillance plumbing, sending concepts like user logged period and pregnancy mode entered, through its pipes, to improve ad revenues through Meta's targeting platform" .. ad-events .. this is the kind of behavior that happened, in plain-ish speaking terms, per what I read in my non-expert capacity.
Q: (answered) Now I want to know who runs (ran?) Flo - can we find their Board of Directors & C-level people on LinkedIn to profile what kind of industries lead to this kind of (I believe) privacy violating behaviors? It's a biased question on my part, as Correlation is not Causality! Onwards ..
My limited, biased, AI-driven research suggests the violating behavior ran from June 2016 through February 2019, and that generally the Company was designed to be consumer-app with subscriptions and is healthcare-adjacent, targeting an unregulated non-HIPPA market.
- INVESTORS = consumer subscription apps with ad-driven growth loops
- BUSINESS MODEL =
(1) free or freemium consumer apps where
(2) growth depends on paid acquisition through Meta/Google/TikTok ad platforms, which
(3) requires sending conversion events back to those platforms to optimize ad spend, and
(4) the SDKs that do this are designed by ad networks to hoover up everything by default.
- EXECUTIVE =
* No Privacy / Data Protection C-level officers during violating period
Why would anyone think that a non-HIPPA compliant app would keep medical information private to the level of security needed for medical data? Flo has definitely breached user trust, but that trust seems misplaced from the get-go.
People are used to living in highly regulated markets. When they go to a grocery store to buy lettuce, people don't stop to ask "what regulatory regime is this lettuce being sold under?". They just trust that food being sold in a food store will meet our societal standards for food. I can go to Amazon and order a raw steak for delivery, and still trust it will meet standards.
The situation with wellness apps is that they are a product that are designed specifically to exist outside of the regulatory regime that people associate with them.
>Why would anyone think that a non-HIPPA compliant app would keep medical information private to the level of security needed for medical data?
because lots of people dont know what HIPPA is, and (naively to us more familiar with tech) assume that a medical-related app on a curated app store would be safe for medical-related stuff.
> lots of people dont know what HIPPA is
Ironically, it's HIPAA.
You're right, though; it's much more limited than people think. During COVID people claimed everything violated HIPAA (masks, vaccine requirements, testing), but it only applies in a very narrow subset of patient/provider relationships.
Very much so. Also ironically, as a healthcare provider (paramedic), HIPAA expressly allows me to get your healthcare information without your consent (as needed for your care). A lot of facilities have you sign paperwork to explicitly authorize sharing, but that's really just a CYA.
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
Source: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/481/does-hip...
The bigger gap is for healthcare and business operations which is very broad and includes datasets for AI training as one example.
That seems entirely unironic and reasonable, though?
100% reasonable (and often necessary - pill shopping, psychiatric concerns, etc. And not irony in the Act itself, more people's perception of its intent.
It is not reasonable to disregard patients' consent so generally. Specific purposes could have specific exceptions.
I think the key is in the course of treatment.
I agree that it's not and never should be a free-for-all with PHI just "because you can".
But if I, as an EMS provider, are treating someone for, say, an overdose, it is rather germane to my treatment of you that you have a history of suicidal ideation or attempts, even if you'd rather I wasn't able to gather that information from another provider's records (because you'd "rather not" be subject to a mandated hold/evaluation if it appears that your overdose was intentional).
I don't need to know, and don't care, if you're transitioning and I'm seeing you for a seizure, for example, it's not relevant. If you're unconscious and I need to see if I can see history or diagnoses or etc., as I'm determining the risk of an intervention to perform on you, then, I may discover that detail, again, in the course of your treatment.
It's not a blanket "I don't care whether you consent or not, I'm pulling your records from the EHR. Sucks to be you."
People just wanna track stuff, they don't really look into is something HIPPA compliant or read the ToS. App store push, recommendation, word of mouth are what makes the app like this spread, not really details HIPPA compliance.
"Because Apple and Google said my data was safe, so it must be safe in the apps. What's hippa?," said more than 50% of the population.
I don't have a period, so I'm not the best person to do it, but there really needs to be a solid FOSS alternative to flo. If GNU had more women, it'd probably already exist
I did a quick review of what FOSS options are currently out there
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936103
There are a plethora of open-source implementations available on F-Droid. They need to be looked at for privacy before choosing one, but there are completely offline ones.
If I had confidence I could maintain it, I would love to work on a PWA one
A comparable FOSS app called Drip has been on F-Droid since forever.
Drip has a paradoxical flaw: by trying to be extremely inclusive and making a "gender-neutral" app (without the colour pink) to include trans people, it discourages some people from using it. At least, my friend told me she thought the design was ugly and was looking for a "cute" app, so she ended up using Flo instead of Drip despite my many warnings.
I think FLOSS apps often forget that not everyone is a developer or a nerd who prioritizes privacy and ethics over design, which is a real problem since people end up using proprietary apps that data-mine them.
That sounds not so much as a flaw, as a conscious product decision. And to be honest, doesn't sound like a bad one, not every app needs to work or look the same way, as long as people have choices, they can be responsible for the choices they make. If someone wants a safer but boring app or if someone wants a cute "who gives a fuck about privacy" app, both should be fine.
The problem is that there is literally no other free and open-source app to track your periods, so you're forced to use some proprietary piece of shit that sells all possible medical information about its users.
There seem to be lots of FOSS period tracking apps available, look at the other comments in this submission!
What seems to be lacking, is a FOSS period-tracking app that also lets you share stuff with a partner, which is the reason me and my partner use Flo in the first place.
The government does NOT let people have choices in many cases. People should NOT be forced to choose between medical privacy and potential prosecution.
That your comment even implied that would be acceptable in this context is appalling.
I don't know where you got "the government" from, all I'm saying is that apps should be allowed to have cute designs or boring designs, based on their own judgement, and that people should be allowed to freely choose between those. No one should be FORCED to chose anything, I agree, and I didn't imply anything like that.
Regardless of your opinion on gender and identity politics, surely people can agree that only biological women have periods.
Not quite! While trans women obviously don't have menstrual cycles a good chunk of the population suffer from period-like symptoms/PMS just due to similar hormonal fluctuations.
Aren't those 100% predictable since they are caused by external application of said hormones?
There are multiple factors like dosage and specific hormone regimen (some do monotherapy while others do estrogen and a anti-androgen), but generally yes
Of course, but treating transgender men like you would a cisgender woman with all the same gendered expectations is both incredibly disrespectful if done on purpose and humiliating for someone who very much does not want to be treated as a woman despite having a period that most likely already makes them very uncomfortable and dysphoric
> only biological women have periods
generally, yes, but there are so many edge cases there with intersex people that it is far easier and more inclusive to just say roughly 50 percent of the human population has periods and avoid having to deal with the million asterisks that come with that statement
50% of the human population will at some point in their life have periods, perhaps; but presumably (due to childhood and menopause) less than 50% of the human population has recently experienced a period.
Language is consumed by people, not machines.
You don't have to speak like a lawyer.
There is no intersex person waiting to jump out and yell accusatory things at you because you didn't include sufficient asterisks or you said statements that are 99.9999% true.
> There is no intersex person waiting to jump out and yell accusatory things at you because you didn't include sufficient asterisks or you said statements that are 99.9999% true.
I would assume that the app isn’t pink because the devs aren’t worried about getting yelled at. The number of intersex people is minuscule compared to the amount of folks that have Opinions about them online.
I don't quite understand your point. Is Drip non-pink to include trans men? That sounds really far fetched to me. And your friend found it ugly because it's not pink? Design is obviously subjectivity and perhaps your friend prefers the color pink, but has any of this actually anything to do with trans people and inclusiveness?
What's your reasoning for the conclusion of the app looking the way it does due to this and not due to the developer just subjectively preferring this design?
In the app description: "Not another cute, pink app. drip. is designed with gender inclusivity in mind"
So it's a perfectly conscious choice, and that's exactly what turns off some women who might prefer a cute, pink app. I have nothing against inclusivity, quite the opposite, but in this case they could offer two themes rather than imposing an app that isn't "cute". Even as a man, you can prefer cute things.
I think this could easily be fixed by allowing themes of some kind
took me a while to figure out what you were even responding to:
> Not another cute, pink app. drip. is designed with gender inclusivity in mindful
so a FOSS community should bimboify their app because your friend wants her data pinkwashed more than she wants her data safe? sounds like a her problem but she could always fork herself
My friend isn't a developer; on the contrary, she's pretty tech illiterate. She has very little patience for testing 10 different apps. I think it would be possible to have two themes: a neutral one, and a pink and cute one.
or, like I suggested, allow custom ones. I know a trans guy who would think a shark themed period app is pretty cool (he calls it his shark week)
I seriously doubt that the vast majority of women would avoid using a period tracking app just because it's not pink and stereotypically girly. Frankly, I find the notion vaguely offensive.
iOS/watchOS has had period tracking functionality with completely sterile design and people use it just fine.
https://www.my28x.com/ I recently heard a talk from this founder. It's free and local, but don't think it's OSS. They have a high ORCHA rating, but waiting to see if they keep their business model this way
How does the sharing between partners happen with 28x, or is it literally local-only as in "solely for one person and no way to share with partner"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47934116
I don't know how many more examples people need to see of big tech not respecting privacy... it's just becoming a farce now. Big tech tracking woman's cycles? Of course they are. (sigh) If this doesn't gross people out enough to seriously pursue alternatives, I literally don't know what will.
It's really sad that we have all this technology but we can't trust any of it.
I think that kind of thinking is similar to the "both sides" stuff in politics. There's a meaningful difference in trustworthiness between different options.
For instance, if you need to track your period, the built in iOS apps are secure, especially if you're using advanced icloud encryption.
The trouble is that it's literally impossible to tell what applications are trustworthy and what applications are not, or whether they'll remain trustworthy over time. So you have to treat them all as untrustworthy. It's a fair rule of thumb because the majority of them can't be trusted.
I'm hearing you say that it's impossible to tell the difference between the trustworthiness of Apple and of Flo?
I'll make a period tracker for you for 5 bucks a month. You won't buy it, because it costs 5 bucks a month. So I'll have to find alternative monetisation strategies.
Why would me giving you 5 bucks a month assure you didn't also sell all of the data from the period tracker app? That's money you'd just be leaving on the table.
Doesn't flo charge ten dollars a month?
https://help.flo.health/hc/en-us/articles/4411278780564-What...
Nobody is going to trust your $5 a month service.
why does it have to be 5 bucks a month and not a one time purchase?
there is a third option: don't make one at all if you feel your only recompense involves selling this data. that's what creeps do.
Now is a good time to bring up.
https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io
A secure open source period tracking app.
A nontrivial issue is how the app looks, unfortunately
At this point, if you don't trust that they share your data with third parties with the AI tools available and open-source LLMs, just vibe-code your own health apps and keep them stored on a Mac mini or something else for the female devs here.
This is one more reason sector-specific privacy expectations probably need to be harder-coded. Hoping every consumer app will independently exercise restraint has not gone especially well.
Hey surely Meta wouldn’t send that data to a government interested in regulating women’s reproductive rights
This article is about a lawsuit filed in 2021.
https://www.labaton.com/cases/frasco-v-flo-health-inc
its crazy to me that Flo is used so widely, as its started by Russian men and their treatment of data has bee public for a while, it just hasnt spread fast enough. I know theres at least one other option called Calessa (http://Calessa.app)
There's a whole heap of different period tracking apps these days. I've been using Clue for probably a decade.
That one is good I think. It's German and adheres to EU privacy laws. The main FLOSS one is called drip. Has some funding from the German government as well as Mozilla
https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io/
Period tracking is a perfect use case for homomorphic encryption, so there's a server that holds the data and can operate on it, without knowing the data itself.
"Flo, through the Flo App, unlawfully shared users’ sensitive health data – including menstrual cycle, ovulation, and pregnancy-related information – with third parties such as Meta, Google, and Flurry for their own commercial us"
If the app sold the data to Meta through extremely automated Meta platforms. Doesn't the bulk of legal liability and social backlash lie on the app instead of on Meta?
Like sure if a company is caught buying stolen goods, maybe they could tighten up due diligence, but the actual thief is the main culprit.
https://www.plannedparenthooddirect.org/spot-on-period-track...
This one seems clear cut as a HIPAA violation. Glad to hear that interpretation was upheld.
However, regardless, we really need to just kill the data broker business model.
Speaking as someone who implemented GDPR for my startup when the law first came into effect, there were certainly rough edges.
But the core premise that you simply cannot sell user data to sub-processors without consent is a powerful one that I believe would fix a lot of broken things in the US system.
(Not least because the USG buys private data that would be unconstitutional for it to directly collect, but also things like the incentives for your cell phone provider to sell your location data to advertisers.)
> This one seems clear cut as a HIPAA violation. Glad to hear that interpretation was upheld.
Health and wellness apps aren’t covered entities under HIPAA so these disclosures are not violations of it.
Seriously, we have a country where a large fraction of our ad spend is for services that promise to remove your private data from data brokers. We could literally just pass laws so companies could not do this.
HIPAA makes our medical privacy worse, unfortunately.
Same video, different platforms:
(https://odysee.com/@NaomiBrockwell:4/HIPAA:7)
(https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=4sfIBRTcRpU)
(https://youtube.com/watch?v=4sfIBRTcRpU)
Great video, thanks for sharing.
TL;DW: HIPAA was actually created to allow insurance companies to share patient data without having to get patient consent. Before HIPAA, data was more fractured and less commonly shared. The only privacy protections it offers is, e.g., your doctor not giving your data to your boss. But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data (everything from health startups to insurance companies to hospitals)
Reminds me of this Seinfeld episode when Elaine was marked as "difficult" in her chart, and then she couldn't get a single doctor to see her. She wasn't allowed to see her chart or edit it after that. As soon as she got to a new clinic, they would receive a phone call from another doctor warning them not to treat her.
S8.E5 The Package
(https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/seinfeld/comments/168m2d9/anyo...)
I doubt it was a critique of HIPPA, although the episode was published a little under 2 months after HIPPA was signed.
How great would it be for our privacy if they went back to paper records, though.
> But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data
Somewhat. They are allowed to access it "for treatment purposes", not just to nose around out of curiosity.
I found myself explaining this to a number of my patients (I used to be a paramedic) who were irate about disclosures they'd made to their therapist, doctor, etc., that they had said they didn't want revealed to other providers (but were actually germane to their care).
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/481/does-hip...
HIPAA is much less protective than people think, but "the law allows this thing you hate" isn't going to make people hate something less
One problem is all the data breaches it encourages. Data breaches are already bad enough with the providers I actually use without 1000s of random companies having access.
That's incredibly creepy.
Does anyone happen to know if Meta and Google have ever recovered these judgements from the app developers? All of the industry terms of service specifically forbid SDK licensees from sending sensitive personal data to the platforms, and they require the licensee to indemnify the platform against any judgement that arises from violating those terms. See Meta's statement on this verdict, which seems pretty reasonable to me. This 100% looks like the fault of the app developer:
“User privacy is important to Meta, which is why we do not want health or other sensitive information and why our terms prohibit developers from sending any.” Meta maintains that any transmission of sensitive health data is due to a failure to comply with its terms of use.
I mean this seems like an attempt at a get out of jail free card. If meta didnt want this info, why are they accepting and processing it?
It's just a generic key-value API.
That doesn't answer the question. It just restates the problem. Why aren't they doing diligence on what they're accepting from their business partners, or what types of partners they're working with? There's no reason they couldn't know the company deals with health data and place it under additional scrutiny.
I will say, with codex/cc access and a free weekend you could make an app that covers like 99% of this app’s purpose. The harder part would be the art/making it cutesy, as some other commenters have pointed out. Plain SwiftUI or compose just isn’t eye catching enough
I don't actually see this as a problem, and instead it's a PSA everyone needs to internalize:
If you put data onto a networked device it may be sent to some place else.
If you don't want your data being shared:
Use a device that does not have any networking capability (both hardware and software wise)
Use a pen and paper, you can shred and destroy as you see fit.
If you're using an application on a mobile device with mobile data/wifi, the chances are, your data is being uploaded.
There are four open source period tracking apps on F-droid. I didn't do a full investigation of the source code, but unless your data is being uploaded outside the app (e.g. for backups), I feel safe assuming it will stay local only.
It sounds like the real solution to this is to be able to control permissions at an OS level for network per app, as you would be able to do if you had root access. I have no idea why regular Android distros don't allow you to do this, it seems like a really sensible thing to expose in app settings given the permissions model of Android.
Of course you do, your comment is just clickbait. Here's why:
| I don't actually see this as a problem
Okay, go on, perhaps you have an interesting point
| and instead it's a PSA everyone needs to internalize
If it's not a problem, it's not a PSA because nobody needs to know or care. If it's something worthy of a PSA, then it must stem from a problem.
Also: if you are not paying the service provider for the service, you are not their customer - you are their product.
If you do pay for a subscription, how can you be sure you're still not the product? What stops them from double dipping here?
If you're paying for a subscription, the company might sell your data. If you're using a commercial service for free, they are certainly selling your data.
Having said that, you're right to be suspicious of commercial services, even that you pay for. Someone can found a startup with a strong commitment to customer privacy and the best of intentions, but a few acquisitions or near bankruptcies later, those commitments will go out the window.
Relevant to this case, since they have a free version and premium one, they would probably just sell data from both sets of customers. It would be leaving money on the table otherwise, right?
The small chance that they might go out of their way to not sell premium users data doesn't seem worth much.
Flo isn't free though, you have to pay a weekly/yearly subscription to use it.
that is a really fucked up view
Less a f-u-view, more a f-u-world, the above is pragmatic advice about the actual IRL challenges of keeping data secure.
Further, a view that ignores many real world digital data risks faced by those considered to be useful targets; eg: compromised supply chains delivering "pre hacked" hardware with discreet wifi chips or hidden out of band comms, etc.
Nah. A healthy view when dealing with the fucked up situation that is modern life.
You can use a networked device, but make sure the data is stored somewhere you control (and own).
> It seems like we can’t just necessarily leave it up to companies – or their ragtag teams of crackpot lawyers rewriting privacy policies every few months – to keep our private data private.
It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to. Not everything needs to be an app. All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
I've never used Flo specifically, so I don't know what kind of data analysis it has available, but period data is the #1 most useful health data to have an app crunch for you, and "your period starts tomorrow" is a pretty darn useful notification to get.
Most of the women I know well enough to know this about them track and predict the onset of their next period without needing an application. It isn't exactly rocket science.
Well, until some years ago we remembered dozens of phone numbers, birthdays, routes, physical addresses, due dates, etc.
The trick is to "give a tool for 1-2 generations of customers" , and then they'll be fully dependent on the tool.
1-2 generations? give an advanced anything to anyone with no true knowledge of how to do it without the tool and you'll have people fully dependent in hours.
kids today cannot navigate without turn-by-turn. nobody looks at the map to get names of major streets, they just blindly follow the directions. I learned how to navigate as a kid just by being bored and staring out the window and being able to recognize things. Now, kids don't even look out the window as they keep their heads down and eyes glued to a screen.
This is a strawman argument. Nobody is arguing that period apps are a necessity. Women have been tracking our periods without computers since prehistoric times. Women were doing rocket science calculations before computers, for that matter. Of course we can do without period apps. But they're more useful than any other health tracking device or app that I can think of.
We're using Flo specifically, mostly for sharing stuff like "her period starts tomorrow" to the both of us, she doesn't really need a notification for that :)
I'm not sure I understand your argument. It's important enough that she has it set up to share that data to both of you, but it's so unimportant she doesn't need a notification for it?
Yes, it is useful for me as a partner to know, ideally without having to ask her, and not important for her to be notified, since without the notification she'll notice it anyways sooner or later...
I'm sorry but this is bordering on parody to me. The way she would notice it "sooner or later" is by her bleeding on her clothes and possibly even furniture. In what world is it important for you to just know about it and somehow not important for her to avoid that?
> The way she would notice it "sooner or later" is by her bleeding on her clothes and possibly even furniture.
No, many can feel it beforehand, and you notice it when you go to the bathroom before as well, as certain things change their properties slightly, it's not a "nothing" phase and then "floods out of your body".
It's borderline parody how little education there is for males when it comes to things like this.
I appreciate that you've educated yourself about these issues, but let me assure you from decades of personal experience and conversations with other women that it is useful to be notified when your period is going to start.
More "experienced" it than anything, everyone is different of course which is why I'm not saying that everyone needs/don't need it. Thank you but no need for any assurances, my partner lives with me and shares her experience and thoughts about it freely, and I'll continue to listen to what she says she needs/doesn't need :)
Hm. Well, congratulations on being the first man to mansplain menstruation to me. Somebody already knocked out breastfeeding years ago. Pregnancy is still up for grabs, if any men out there want to take a whack at telling me what that's like.
I'm not even explaining anything, just telling you there are other perspectives out there, and sharing my partner's perspective. No need to try to paint yourself as a victim here, and I'm sorry if you took it as "This is how you feel according to me", I was just trying to explain another persons perspective.
Even if it was a requirement, doctors do not generally have legal authority to compel action. Hell, the average doctor would probably agree that the average patient hardly ever does what they’re told…
privacy legislation would just solve the problem by itself though.
Privacy legislation by itself does not solve the problem; what Flo did was already illegal. Effective enforcement is also necessary.
They need to make an example out of these companies. If your whole business model is built around handling sensitive data, and you are caught shipping off that data to brokers, you should be liquidated or at least fined to within an inch of bankruptcy, as basically all of your profits are a sham.
Fined into bankruptcy and all managers up to and including the CEO criminally charged.
There needs to be penalties that piece the "limited liability" because otherwise it's just "pay to get away with it" as we currently have.
I've been for a "corporate death penalty" (if companies are people, they can be executed) which would result in the shareholders losing everything along with executives being perp-walked.
Not just executives. They don't will these things into existence. Someone had to build functionality to send user data to Facebook.
Not to side with this behaviour, but I think if you consent to it in the Ts & Cs then it's legal. And that makes sense - otherwise how else do you agree to things or not agree to them?
The point of laws is that T&Cs don't matter if the law has something to say. If the law e.g. were to criminalize sharing health information in this way, then it doesn't matter if the users agreed; you still go to prison for doing it.
They've been thumbing their noses at EU privacy legislation and fines for quite some time already.
What does thumbing their noses mean? They have been paying while continuing their behavior, or not paying at all?
The first seems like it could be resolved with an escalating fine schedule, and the second could be mitigated by requiring Apple/Google to remove it from the app store (one of the rare cases walled gardens are on consumers' side).
> What does thumbing their noses mean? They have been paying while continuing their behavior, or not paying at all?
Malicious compliance. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
"While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025."
Or https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu/
"UPDATE: Previously, Apple announced plans to remove the Home Screen web apps capability in the EU as part of our efforts to comply with the DMA."
(This one resulted in enough fuss they backed down.)
Ah you mean generally, not in this specific case.
> privacy legislation would just solve the problem by itself though
Just like banning drugs and murder did!
"would just solve", lol.
Why is it a waste? If you want to provide an app, one should follow the law and the regulations. It isn't the wild west (and even that had regulations).
Also: Why blame the victims, not the perp?
> Why blame the victims
This is a bit of a revealing phrasing, but I'll bite anyway. If someone shot themselves in the toe because they were being careless, am I blaming the victim by saying that they shouldn't have been careless? Not everything is cops and robbers.
Nobody is blaming victims, please stop these wild fabulations. OP meant that you can't trust app owners especially long term, as you write its worse than wild west, literally nobody.gives.a.fuck. till they are dragged to the court, then they fight, dissolve company, still sell the data, start a new one and rinse and repeat. People are simply way more greedy than moral on average if there is any lesson in current times.
Look at say zuckenberg - a typical sociopath lying again and again through his nose with big grin just to get what he wants (ie scandals how FB employees go to DB to spy on their exes or enemies is popping up for 10 years at least and there is no stop, every time there is another assurance how it can't be done now blablabla... and thats just specific meta employees).
Nobody likes that, but just sitting and waiting for almighty regulators while blindly trusting apps in good faith to do their jobs is... not working much, is it. Be smart, adapt to real environment out there, not some wishful thinking. In parallel push for change as much as you can, vote with wallet and your time. Once sought-for paradise comes then feel free to use anything anyhow. At least that seems like smarter approach to me.
> still sell the data
So add liability for the buyers of the data or any services derived from the data (e.g. targeted ads). Make it so large advertisers demand audits showing privacy laws are being followed. Also have personal criminal liability for people building and maintaining systems that collect, store, or process data for illegal purposes. Executives, PMs, engineers, the whole lot. Put them in prison if they continue.
> All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
That isn't what's happening. The regulations don't get little niche cases added to them, they're writen to be generally applicable to all niches.
> It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to.
"Just don't use the computer if you don't want companies to rat you out to the fascist government that'll imprison or kill you for having a miscarriage" is a ridiculous victim-blaming position.
It's the practical reality of a fascist government that they won't enact privacy laws. And yes, women really shouldn't be using period tracking apps in the US, or made by the US. But that doesn't mean privacy laws are some "silly waste of my tax money".
It's not a "medical requirement" except for the many many many cases where it is. Similarly, this position extends to literally everything. Nothing "needs to be an app". But unless we want to pack up and discard the entire software industry, it really ought to be better about privacy like this.
> "Just don't use the computer if you don't want companies to rat you out to the fascist government that'll imprison or kill you for having a miscarriage" is a ridiculous victim-blaming position.
No-one's saying this, and based on your wording you seem to be trained on some very predictable and narrow corpuses.
> It's not a "medical requirement" except for the many many many cases where it is.
Flo is not a medical device. It's not prescribed. It's just a consumer app, no different medically or legally to writing your feelings diary into Google Keep. If you have an actual medical device app then this would be a problem.
> No-one's saying this
No-one was saying it explicitly. I merely took what you said and re-stated what it concretely meant in the real world.
The generalization to "all computers" is an assumption, but you appear to maintain a narrow view of what is "medically necessary" and just now generalize to things like dairies, so I believe I am correct in asserting that you would generalize this to all "non-essential" software.
Forest for the trees, dude.