VANCOUVER - A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can move forward over alleged privacy breaches against a company that made an app to track users’ menstrual and fertility cycles. The ruling published online Friday says the action against Flo Health Inc. alleges the company shared users’ highly personal health information with third-parties, including Facebook, Google and other companies.
Wow, my girlfriend uses this. Time to get her a FOSS-grown solution. Fuck the corpos!
They need to fix their SSL certificate.
Seems like they didn’t set www to redirect to the main site. If you go to https://dripapp.org it works fine.
Here are some privacy focused alternatives (only for android 😕): https://pluja.github.io/awesome-privacy/#menstrual-cycle-trackers
I wrote a period tracker app that also encrypts/password protects the data at rest. If you’re concerned about someone taking your phone and accessing your data, it may also be worth a look.~~https://github.com/cameroncros/PrivatePeriodTracker~~
~~https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cross.privateperiodtracker~~
Drip looks better for most people though. But they should add encryption if they dont already have it.Use drip.
Encryption and password protection is in the changelog for drips first version v0.0.1 - 5 years ago
I couldnt find your app on fdroid btw
Periodical is no wifi, no bs and stored locally on your phone storage. Also is about 5mb in size so pretty minimal. If anyone is interested here’s the link https://f-droid.org/packages/de.arnowelzel.android.periodical/
I remember back in my teenage days, I tried to track some menstruations. It didn’t end well.
Classic mistake. You weren’t rich enough.
Damn man, my gf pays for this app. That’s how we track her days. Corpos even know when we’re probably having sex now D:.
Even your car might know.
For those that aren’t aware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYcmF9IAJbU
That’s f’ed up.
Come on, it is the 21st century.
Nobody should assume any other reason to create such an app than to harvest and sell personal medical data.
Unless:
I am glad I finally got my wife use this Foss alternative instated of some garbage that sends your data to a proprietary server.
free, open source, everything stored locally: https://dripapp.org/
Thanks! Was looking for something more privacy focused. I had not found this one.
I am quite impressed by the funders, German state and Mozilla. Wow.
Of all the things you most certainly do not need to upload to the cloud…
I mean cloud apps are popular because they are convenient. It’s just a shame that they are invariably infested with toxic capitalism. And now apparently Christian fascists.
Result: “sorry we shared your personal data, here’s a check for 38 cents. “
It’s 2024. People still assume apps installed on their phones aren’t siphoning every single 1 and 0 on your phone including your texts and recordings of your voice calls and then selling that data to a 3rd party advertising firm.
Why in FUCKS name would you put your menstrual cycle data on an app that some stranger made?
It’s useful?
Why the fuck would you ever enter that kind of information into your phone? Did they ever make any promises about it all being end-to-end encrypted?
Are the owners of the app based in a privacy friendly country? What kind of things do they require for passwords?
Worse than betterhelp right there. people that use services like those are fucking sheep.
Periods are awful to keep track of yourself, it’s not a perfect, “every 4 weeks for 5 days” thing. Those apps actually recalculate the beginning and end of a period when something abnormal happens, like stress moving the period back a few days. This way you don’t need to keep it in a personal calendar, which mind you, a lot of people don’t even have.
Btw, most apps do also more than just regular tracking, they can predict how bad blood flow will be, and if your periods are known to be rather painful, they can keep track and remind you when a day comes on which you’d need to pack a few extra painkillers.
Hard to argue with any of those points. Nice of you to kindly elaborate for people trying to blame the victims of the scheme.
While the explanation is great, I feel like it shouldn’t even be necessary. Like, if people are using an app, can we not just assume that they have a reason for it? A reason that, to them at least, is a good one? Regardless of what the app is about, or which demographic is using it, it seems infantilising not to make that assumption.
Periods are never properly explained in school, a lot of people simply get taught by their mother, or survive with what little knowledge the biology textbook holds about them.
I cannot blame someone for not knowing how awfully complicated they are, when school at most teaches about the ideal period, not even mentioning how much can affect them, or how awful they can be for some people.
This way you don’t need to keep it in a personal calendar, which mind you, a lot of people don’t even have.
proton unlimited, proton calendar. Completely private and end-to-end encrypted.
But okay, I guess these apps can be helpful. I still think it’s a terrible idea to enter information like that into an app that doesn’t guarantee privacy. That’s sensitive medical data. I don’t give a fuck what any ToS says, no one except you should have the power to give away that kind of information about yourself.
Maybe you could direct your righteous anger at the people misselling the app, not the people who use it to help them get pregnant or to avoid becoming pregnant in a proto-fascist society that has removed their right to an abortion?
Right?? Like what is this rage against the users?!
For Women’s Right Day, the android app store featured the lead of Security and Privacy of this very app. A lady BTW. Fuck me sideways how that was a ton of crap, retrospectively. She said in so many words the usual “privacy foremost” and other such obvious shit, then she also said “no selling ever”.
I despair of humanity.
So you learned about pandering from two angles on stupid pointless holiday-day.
I especially wouldn’t recommend anyone in the a red state in the US to use a period tracker. States are serious about prison sentences for people seeking abortions and even miscarriages. If a state like Texas or South Carolina gets ahold of that information it’s going to ruin your life.
I used these kinds of apps when I was a teenager. I could not keep up with a calendar - I tried but my cycles were too irregular to be predictable based on the calculations I could find in books and the internet. I’m transgender and found the entire experience unpleasant in a fairly intense way.
Those kinds of apps helped me immensely. Most of them offer some sort of discreet icon or password system - my parents were the type to read my diary/calendars. My periods are all over the place, and I was able to safely log a pattern in related pain/duration/quantity… most of them included links to places to find medical information. I found one that wasn’t pastel pink and just treated me like a person keeping track of their medical statistics. I got to feel neutral about a part of my body which I despised.
The problem is not that people are naive enough to hand over the information to a third party they can not trust. The problem is the paucity of information and resources for menstrual health. Periods are complicated and scary. When you’re a teenager, you’re not worried about data security - you’re worried about trying to make sure you know when your next cycle will start so that you don’t experience the hell that is bleeding through your pants in math class.
I’ll check my subscription but Im pretty sure Proton doesn’t calculate when I ovulate.
Right, but the privacy implications trump all of that for me.
There’s not a word in this article about why this breach of privacy matters while others do not. It’s not stated whether this was in the terms of service for the app, and whether those terms were ruled against.
All kinds of apps have been selling personal information for a long time, and it’s been ruled before that it’s allowed if they have the proper legalese in the terms of service. Did this app just not have any terms of service?
Why is it a breach of privacy for this app, but other apps doing the same selling of personal data is not?
Why is it a breach of privacy for this app, but other apps doing the same selling of personal data is not?
From the article…
The lawsuit alleges that Flo Health misused users’ personal information “for its own financial gain,” claiming breach of privacy, breach of confidence and “intrusion upon seclusion.”
IANAL, but my understanding, after having read the whole article, is that regardless of the fact that there may or may not have been an agreement between the app creator and its users, that they still ran foul of laws that cannot be waived by any sort of TOU/EULA agreement.
I read the article too, and those things you quoted sound to me like things every app does.
Hence my question: what is different here?
regardless of the fact that there may or may not have been an agreement between the app creator and its users, that they still ran foul of laws that cannot be waived by any sort of TOU/EULA agreement.
It’s not a matter of something being different or not. It’s no matter what, it’s illegal. Law trumps any TOU/EULA.
So what are they doing that illegal that other apps aren’t doing??
I really don’t know how to be any more clear with this question.
