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Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

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Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#141

Post by nlitened »

scblock wrote: post #122
nlitened wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single of the six links you provided are about miscarriages and not abortions. Either I don’t understand something medical (not a doctor), or you’re mixing things to derail a conversation (dishonestly or unintentionally). Whether those miscarriages were natural or a result of human malice, is an absolutely separate discussion. How does all that prove an original point that an abortion can get a woman to prison?

This comment in this thread explains it fairly clearly. Do not make the mistake of thinking this is just a semantic difference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247822

I agree that overreach of prosecution is possible (as with many other laws), but I disagree that a fix for bad laws or bad legal process is “make it easier for people to break laws and not get caught, and to cooperate discreetly on breaking laws”

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#142

Post by rustcleaner »

Probably the best one-liner fix in law I can think of, is to make it a imprisonable felony to give money to someone or an organization for the purpose of speaking a particular message as their own, and accepting money in exchange for speaking a message as your own. Basically ban advertising, or at least make each commercial basically say "General Motors has paid us to tell you that ... ... ..." instead of the sexy seductive style we have today. Ads, if they are to exist at all, should be limited to factual/quantitative statements about performance and reliability, and must not use any suggestive/qualitative statements. We need to make the various pillars of modern advertising criminal offenses: the main one is the use of psychological/memetic trickery to spread and make memorable a message for commercial purposes, then there's the financial incentive to shit up our cyberspaces with sponsored messages. The only place I should EVER EVER EEEVERRR find an advertisement for (say) a plumber, should be in the local directory for businesses under the plumbing section, and the list must be sortable and filterable by basic transparent criteria (no hidden magic feed algorithms).

It is legal to swindle someone in this country, so long as they get swindled enthusiastically and don't think they got swindled. I think being induced to buy a hamburger at midnight by a well placed ad, instead of just reheating some left-overs, is a swindling even if your dependency on this model for your economic survival has you kneejerking on me! The goal is we all turn into self-sufficient economic agents, not be labor-cattle induced by advertising memes to go into interest bearing debt by a thousand little charges.

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#143

Post by TechPlasma »

NoTranslationL wrote: post #23

If anyone is interested in a privacy focused tracking app that stores all your data locally, I make an app called Reflect [0] whose sole purpose is this, plus on-device analysis. We’re working on a menstrual tracking feature right now and it’s pretty far along. We’ve just released an anomaly detection feature as well. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

Do you have a link to the Android app?

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#144

Post by duxup »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #89

They don't need apps to do this. I sat in a meeting with a data broker in 1998 where one of their managers was chuffed that they could determine menstrual cycles by analyzing purchasing records. And it wasn't hygiene products. Various foods and other spending patterns pop out after a 28-day correlation over groups of women that are artificially "synced" into cohort groups. This invasiveness will continue so long as t…

Assuming purchase history has that clear a pattern (I'm doubtful) doesn't that mean that purchase history alone would ... what? Not be allowed? Because it could be used to determine other things?

I'm not sure what consumer protections could really do much here if the pattern is obvious and the data exists.

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#145

Post by glowiefedposter »

yatopifo wrote: post #93
josefritzishere wrote: post #36

It is painfully evident sometimes that America desperatelyl needs a GDPR-like federal law. The state-by-state laws are by nature peicemeal and it makes for a wild west of outright PII abuse.

Even if you could create such a law, at this point in time, no law can protect americans agains persecution by government-affiliated groups who are immune from court scrutiny thanks to their protections at the very top. You would first have to send corrupt SC justices to prison, impeach Trump and prosecute all his henchmen. Forgive me, but i doubt this is going to happen now that the US is officially a dictatorship.…

[dead]

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#146

Post by AnEro »

msdrider wrote: post #132
tiahura wrote: post #114

The article doesn't explain how their safety is at risk.

[flagged]

So we aren't seeing any risk in anyone being able to have one's medical data if the other party has the money for it? Especially when some of that medical care is being banned in regions this data isn't treated legally like medical data and have bounties on people reporting on that healthcare received else where?

Instead, the conclusion is just western women are accountability dodging sheeple that are just being coddled?

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#147

Post by dfxm12 »

nlitened wrote: post #85
JohnBooty wrote: post #47

For those wondering why this is a safety issue, in many American states abortion or "fetal harm" is considered murder. You can be imprisoned, theoretically for life. This is of course a rapidly evolving area of law since the fall of Roe v. Wade. Having one's menstrual data available for subpoena is therefore quite a literal safety risk. "At least 38 states authorize homicide charges for causing pregnancy loss" https:…

[flagged]

Lizelle Gonzalez was arrested and jailed for this in Texas.

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#148

Post by ethbr1 »

NoTranslationL wrote: post #110
leereeves wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a good idea with one obvious challenge: how can you prove that data will remain private forever?

That’s a tough guarantee, ultimately you’re placing trust in the device’s security once you limit your attack surface to just local data. So that’s why we’re working on encryption with key custody. Any feature like cloud backups are explicitly opt-out by default so no one is putting their data onto someone else’s servers without knowing what they’re getting into.

(Don't take any of the below in a negative sense! It's awesome you built a privacy-first solution and care about these things, to the extent practical. Below just musings)

I assume the attack vector here is more along the lines of 23andme bankruptcy -- if developer is bought by a new corporate entity / priorities change, what guarantees exist that privacy architecture won't backslide via updates?

Users shouldn't be concerned that a minor update or corporate sale will change the bargain they made around their privacy.

Honestly, it'd be great if there were scaled third-party cloud key escrow services coupled with enforced legal guarantees.* ^

It feels like we did cloud wrong from a legal/privacy perspective by not separating keyholder from data-at-rest-holder (legal entity wise). Tenant-based encryption is basically there... just still mingling data and key ownership in the same entity.

GDPR / right to be forgotten would be trivial if there were always a third party (who enforced requirements on any first party) I could submit a request to, that would burn my keys on their side, thus rendering first-party stored data un-practically-retrievable.

(And a third party because, similar to the browser+CA system, balancing power against each other to enforce guarantees of good behavior seems effective)

* Legal guarantees like "no caching keys for longer than X" or "no unencrypted user data at rest"

^ Cloud hosting encryption keys would also solve the ugly UX edge of strong encryption around "I lost my key... help?"

Re: Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

#150

Post by josephg »

XorNot wrote: post #71
Ylpertnodi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people living in the US of Freedom, wouldn't it be good think to 'keep putting in' cycles, despite pregnancy? Should anything untoward happen later, a quick flash o' the app and "Nope, Officer, no siree. Like clockwork, me...".

Duress modes are a frequently overlooked feature in general - e.g. I don't want to just block access to my location, I want to lie about my location entirely.

I want this for my contact address book too. “This app would like to know all your contacts. Allow / send empty contact list / generate garbage data”

I’d also enjoy if my advertising cookies were randomly reused by people all over the globe. And I’d like my phone number and email address to get associated with dozens of other identities.

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