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

Post by sdeframond » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #318

wand3r wrote: post #275

While unlikely, I personally believe that advertising revenue should be taxed at 50%. This would do a lot to align industry incentives. Advertising revenue would be looked at less as a free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere. In this case, maybe the app could be monetized directly instead of whatever the fuck is happening now.

Revenue isn't taxed. Profit is. I suppose you could tax a proportion of your profit at a higher rate, according to the proportion of your revenue that came from advertising. But advertising isn't a "free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere". It's part of a business model that either is sustainable or isn't. If you taxed it that much higher, a lot of businesses would simply go out of business, because people…

Post by macintux » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #339

RandallBrown wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the risk to women's safety is that someone the woman doesn't want to know, could find out that they're pregnant. (Or using birth control or whatever)

Someone being an advertiser buying the data?

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #318

wand3r wrote: post #275

While unlikely, I personally believe that advertising revenue should be taxed at 50%. This would do a lot to align industry incentives. Advertising revenue would be looked at less as a free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere. In this case, maybe the app could be monetized directly instead of whatever the fuck is happening now.

Revenue isn't taxed. Profit is. I suppose you could tax a proportion of your profit at a higher rate, according to the proportion of your revenue that came from advertising. But advertising isn't a "free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere". It's part of a business model that either is sustainable or isn't. If you taxed it that much higher, a lot of businesses would simply go out of business, because people…

Post by VoidWhisperer » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #344

Can anyone tell me why this would be as much of a problem for safety as they are saying? The only thing I can see happening is easier selling of pads and tampons during a certain phase of the moon. Apparently this is what the article suggests too, that certain things are easier to sell at a certain point in the cycle. It’d be embarrassing if someone knew, not dangerous. And even that much feels weird to me for a very…

Post by NoTranslationL » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

hamburglar wrote: post #335

NoTranslationL wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there is no support for “multi-dimensional” metrics. So systolic and diastolic would each have to be their own metric. Food tracking in Reflect could use some work, but if you link with Apple Health, Reflect can pull data from Cronometer or MyFitnessPal for example. Any particular place you thought the premium was very aggressive? I’m open to changing that, it’s not the kind of feedback we normally get. Thanks…

A lot of things I clicked on just led to an upsell page that wanted me to do a week trial that led to a $49 monthly, which surprised me since I hadn’t even begun to explore and only had a single metric which I’d never even recorded a datapoint for. And it seemed like I only was allowed to define a single metric, so I tried to delete it in order to create a new one, but clicking “delete” on it was apparently a premium…