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…
Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spend…
- Targeted advertising.
- Job prospects and workplace monitoring.
- Insurance discrimination.
- Abortion-related issues.
- Cyberstalking.
Targeted advertising is weird thing, but I believe it's not the particularly important issue here. At least I fail to see the severity of seeing more ads for cosmetics (or sweets or home loans or whatever children stuff) correlated with one's hormonal cycle. I'm not saying it's certainly not an issue (or is an issue), but I don't think it's particularly high on most people list of ethical questions to ponder about. Could be considered benign, could be mildly unethical, but most likely not a huge deal. The way I understand it, much worse problems are in the rest of the list.
It seems that - according to the research linked by the article - some people seem to try to step around the legal barriers on discrimination. While those folks can't (legally) directly discriminate on pregnancy status, they use statistical models to discriminate on a probability of such status, based on the data they can currently buy from app developers. Or maybe not the models but a self-reported goal of becoming pregnant - as it's not a pregnancy per se, so I guess they consider it' s a fair game until a lawmaker or a court says otherwise.
Plus there's also an issue, that some governments have different ideas on personhood, and try to equate abortions (and even miscarriages) with homicide, then try to detect "crime" based on this data, is certainly a major concern.
And there's also something about cyberstalking. I can't say I entirely get it, but a distressed mind can do really weird shit.
Summarized:
1. Menstrual cycle data is sold publicly and is not currently considered a PHI.
2. Some people use this data in ways other people could consider unethical.
3. The article doesn't mention how much of it is arguably harmless or less harmful (such as targeting ads based on predicted hormonal changes) and how much of it is severe abuse. It merely mentions the potential of such abuse, but I haven't found anything about its scale.
I could be, of course, wrong about it all. This is just my current understanding of it after reading for a bit. (My initial understanding was much less than this, like GP I just wondered "there are millions of menstruating people, how is data when they have their periods could be possibly so much valuable to be compared to a gold mine?" as IIRC individual demographic and behavioral data is generally of a very limited value.)