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When tracking your period lets companies track you

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Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#131

Post by MandieD »

bregma wrote: post #55
technothrasher wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bah! Back when I was a young parent, we had to track our baby's processes on stone tablets, that were on top of mountain, scratched with our bare fingers, and still our boy grew up into a fine knob thatcher. > do you need what the app gives you to fulfill your responsibilities, or do you just want it to satisfy your urges? There's a third option, which is that while not strictly necessary, certain tools can help make…

> certain tools can help make a job easier Sure. If you insist on doing the unnecessary, possibly harmful job there are plenty of consumer grifts you can join that are waiting to relieve you of your money or exploit you for profit in some other way, like tracking and reselling your personal information. There is, after all, a sucker born every minute. Some of them have recently become parents. But that's not a third…

Uh, you did see the self-hosted part, right?

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#132

Post by MandieD »

ariwilson wrote: post #110
stefan_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the little matter of tens of thousands of years of human evolution where illiterate parents wrote down none of that and were providing to many more babies than just the one. This is extra ironic because there was no point being made besides "you’ve obviously not been the primary caretaker of an infant recently".

There were also thousands of years when parents judged other parents for "that's not how I did it and you turned out just fine!". Thanks gramps :).

If my late mother had been around for this, she would have thought I was nuts for going to so much trouble to breastfeed, and let me know on a regular basis :)

I treasure the detailed baby book she kept about me, though. My nerdy app data is helping me backfill one for my own son, who may or may not be interested in it once he has a kid.

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#133

Post by MandieD »

Vrondi wrote: post #91
hluska wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a serious question and I’d love a real response. Why are so many parents so judgmental?? It’s really interesting. OP shared a story about what works for their child. Rather than just leave it be, you judge it, conclude that it’s going to be a cause of a bad relationship between parent and child and then turn it around so it makes the parent seem selfish. Has it ever occurred to you that none of really know wha…

Breathe a little. Concentrate on parenting your child, not on obsessing with what everyone else thinks. If dealing with all the tech and giving away your child's data does _not_ stress you out, then wonderful! Go find somewhere enthusiastic about that to post. However, every message that is critical of the current techno-take-my-child's-data-please culture isn't aimed at your ego as a targeted personal offense. Peopl…

“…giving away your child’s data”: What part of self-hosted are folks not grasping here, of all places? To be very specific, that data lives in a volume connected to a Docker container running Postgres, accessed by another Docker container running Baby Buddy, on a Hetzner VM, sitting behind WireGuard.

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#134

Post by roughly »

stefan_ wrote: post #66
hhmc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like really bad faith argumentation. You haven't engaged with the point being made -- that the tools _might_ actually make the job easier. You're just reiterating your view that "I didn't need these tools, so they are at best worthless and and at worst exploitative"

There is the little matter of tens of thousands of years of human evolution where illiterate parents wrote down none of that and were providing to many more babies than just the one. This is extra ironic because there was no point being made besides "you’ve obviously not been the primary caretaker of an infant recently".

A fun fact is that most of the increase in life expectancy has come via a reduction in infant and child mortality

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#135

Post by MandieD »

vharuck wrote: post #57
citiguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created a simple spreadsheet that we printed out / filled out each week. It worked great. No need for an app.

Same thing I'm doing right now. I intended to copy the data into CSV files to get a better sense of tracking, but (surprise surprise) I haven't kept up in what little free time the kid allows. So far, the biggest benefits to tracking: - Knowing how long we have until the next feeding. I swear he has a three hour timer in him somewhere. - Knowing if one of us already gave him certain medications today. - Calculating a…

You can always throw away data you logged but later realize you don’t need, but you can’t go back in time and log data you now wish you had.

The benefit to the Baby Buddy approach is that whatever device with a web browser was closest to hand was where I could enter what just happened, or happened a few hours ago, because it was highly unlikely that I’d have entered a bunch of stuff I’d kept on paper into CSV.

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#136

Post by MandieD »

conor_f wrote: post #4

I always appreciate a discussion about surveillance capitalism as it's one of the roots of many, many world problems in today's world. This is such a disgusting, predatory invasion of privacy and it's as pervasive as portrayed in the podcast [1]. These companies should be hit with huge financial penalties and the full force of GDPR should be dropped on them, but I'm sure by now, the largest companies have found looph…

This should be the top comment - as a Baby Buddy enthusiast who isn’t interested in setting up a second child profile, I’m thrilled to find out about Drip!

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#138

Post by andrewjl »

nicbou wrote: post #29
andrewjl wrote: post #23

One solution to this is legally enforceable, personal ownership of ones data. Distributed machine learning makes it possible to proffer data for insights without necessarily sharing it off-device. And unlocking some functionality in exchange. I'm sure more elaborate patterns of exchanges are possible. Is anyone working on this?

The GDPR does this, but it's pretty ineffective. I'm tracked just as much as before, but now they tell me first. Opting out is difficult at best, and often simply impossible.

GDPR still makes transferring data off of ones device necessary. It relies on post-hoc enforcement. A good first step toward data ownership for sure, but can we do better?

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#139

Post by seba_dos1 »

mook wrote: post #114
leppr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android users have F-droid. It has been my first destination for a while when I need an utility app. Many (relatively) expensive paid apps are also fully pro-user.

Unfortunately I couldn't spot a good period tracking app on F-Droid (or other open source ones on GitHub); something pretty with a decent estimate when the next one would be would be nice. Does anybody have recommendations?

A quick search showed me these two: https://github.com/arnowelzel/periodical and https://github.com/wildeyedskies/log28. Both are available on F-Droid.

I don't use Android and I don't have periods, so unfortunately I can't really tell how decent they are - but they both look somewhat reasonable on screenshots.

Re: When tracking your period lets companies track you

#140

Post by SR2Z »

csdvrx wrote: post #8
tata71 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between this, and Peloton and eBay doing portscans of your network, anyone who made fun of people for tech paranoia should be feeling pretty ashamed of themselves right about now for what we've allowed to become commonplace, while simultaneously acknowledging it's only enabled by society ghosting its responsibility to learn tech.

I can't remember exactly which smart device it was, but I think it was my Wyze Watch that asked for wayyyyyy too much information during setup. Like, dear watch, how's my sex, birthday, size and weight gonna help you do your job? I got you to 1) show the time 2) have alarms that I can set without using the phone, like in bed 3) monitor my sleep 4) check my heartrate and saturation when I exercise. There's literally 0…

> Like, dear watch, how's my sex, birthday, size and weight gonna help you do your job?

Come on. Every single one of those is an input for modelling calorie burn. If you don't want your watch to try and estimate that, that's fine - but it's pretty obvious why a fitness tracker would have those features.

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