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Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

femtechdesigndesk.substack.com

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Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#141

Post by malfist »

joe_mamba wrote: post #139
forgotaccount3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion. And facebook doesn't care about people's rights when those people in power are able to block Facebook from acquiring some new startup they want to buy, so facebook is willing to share the information.

>People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion. And what will people in power do with this information?

Do you really have to ask that question? They've criminalized health care. There's motive, history and current events to explain what they'll do with this information.

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#142

Post by array_key_first »

joe_mamba wrote: post #139
forgotaccount3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion. And facebook doesn't care about people's rights when those people in power are able to block Facebook from acquiring some new startup they want to buy, so facebook is willing to share the information.

>People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion. And what will people in power do with this information?

Presumably try to get those women arrested, or at least investigate them.

It's actually quite difficult to investigate an abortion, though. Abortion isn't "real", in the sense that there's no obvious difference between a natural abortion (read: miscarriage) and a purposeful one.

The thing that means abortion abortion colloquially is the purposeful-ness of it. If you knowingly terminate a pregnancy, that's an abortion. If your body terminates its own pregnancy, for a variety of reasons because the human body is very complicated, that's not an abortion.

Generally trusting people with that nuance is, I think, asking for trouble.

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#143

Post by [deleted] »

joe_mamba wrote: post #140
pavel_lishin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome to suggest to your lawyer this particular defense. The people prosecuting women for abortions aren't looking for reasons not to arrest and prosecute them.

>The people prosecuting women for abortions aren't looking for reasons not to arrest and prosecute them. Who are these people doing this?

[deleted]

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#144

Post by freirin »

Hendrikto wrote: post #124
xzjis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#145

Post by intrinsicallee »

joe_mamba wrote: post #140
pavel_lishin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome to suggest to your lawyer this particular defense. The people prosecuting women for abortions aren't looking for reasons not to arrest and prosecute them.

>The people prosecuting women for abortions aren't looking for reasons not to arrest and prosecute them. Who are these people doing this?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-woman-charged-murder-ab...

https://www.newsweek.com/texas-gop-meeting-death-penalty-wom...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/30/pregnancy-us...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/after-overturn-of-roe-more...

"Abstract

When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health first overturned long-standing precedent protecting a woman's fundamental right to abortion, pro-choice leaders issued warnings about the possibility of prosecuting women for abortions. These concerns were dismissed as hysterical or as political theatrics because, in the past, women were rarely prosecuted for their own abortions. This note analyzes the history of illegal abortion before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade to demonstrate that women were targeted, used as leverage against abortion providers, and sometimes arrested for their roles in the procedure." https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj/vol69/iss4/11/

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#146

Post by array_key_first »

3form wrote: post #80
toast0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#147

Post by haldujai »

theptip wrote: post #122

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 be…

> 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.

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#149

Post by SamDc73 »

juggina wrote: post #39
ronbenton wrote: post #33

Hey surely Meta wouldn’t send that data to a government interested in regulating women’s reproductive rights

[flagged]

Not sure why, but they did cooperate with the government on such matters

Facebook previously gave private Messenger chats to Nebraska police, these messages were used as key evidence to charge a mother and daughter over an alleged illegal abortion[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/10/facebook-use...

Re: Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta

#150

Post by culi »

Cider9986 wrote: post #129
theptip wrote: post #122

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 be…

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)

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