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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

#421

Post by areyourllySorry »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #294
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…

This theme of anecdote has been trotted out for more than a half century. In the 80’s the yarn was that a supermarket could tell when a woman was pregnant before her doctor from her purchase patterns alone. To this date, no supermarket has ever produced this result - or any thematically similar.

target

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

#422

Post by anigbrowl »

Aeolun wrote: post #402
anigbrowl wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woman gets pregnant, flagged as such in business intelligence database, she doesn't start buying baby stuff and instead travels out of state, suddenly treated as criminal suspect. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te... I cannot fathom why you think that highly personal data like this should be sold or shared with law enforcement.

I’m not saying it should be shared. I’m just struggling to come up with truly terrifying things you can do with the information. That whole article is going mental over the fact that a cop can run a nationwide search on license plates of all things? What’d be the point of running it on a select few states? “I’ve established that the suspect is not in Texas.”

If you have misunderstood the article so badly, perhaps you should ask someone to sit down and explain to you what it's actually about.

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

#423

Post by os2warpman »

crazygringo wrote: post #420
os2warpman wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If corporations are indeed people, why isn't their income taxed? They can have the mortgage interest deduction, just like me! I'm a people too! Also: >Is that really what you want? Kinda

Because the actual value corporations provide is only in their profit. Whereas the economic value individuals provide is measured by their compensation. It's completely incoherent to tax a corporation based on revenue. If profit margins are an average of 5%, what exactly would you want the tax rate on revenue to be that wouldn't immediately put out of business nearly every corporation on earth? And if individuals got…

Capex and opex create value the same way an individual buying a house (capex) or a happy meal (opex) creates value.

>And just to check, you really want most of journalism to go out of business?

This is bullshit concern trolling.

But if you demand an answer: yes. "JoUrNaLiSm" probably bears half of the fault for getting us to where we are today.

The vast majority of "JoUrNaLiSm" nowadays is just copying and pasting tweets, putting "slams" in the title, and adding commentary anyways.

Low value. Sad. Many such cases.

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

#424

Post by scotty79 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #414
scotty79 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in case of ad companies you could tax the revenue directly. They are strongly vertically integrated so there's really very little reason to track their profit rather than total sales. The only reason you tax profits rather than revenue is that you want to avoid killing businesses that do useful things why operating at low margins. Margins in advertising are huge and what those company do is pure detriment to…

Wouldn't that effectively create a massive moat for high efficiency advertisers? The consequences of such a thing sound systematically perversely centralizing. Sort of like how if you were to ban all advertising tomorrow, it would strongly favor incumbents who have the most 'cached' advertising in human memory.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertisement is pure waste for the economy. You want to make it highly efficient. If you can make it even more efficient than the free market by itself does, you should.

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

#425

Post by steve_adams_86 »

konfusinomicon wrote: post #366
radicalbyte wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why you use it? We used test strips - they're really cheap and way more accurate as women's bodies aren't clocks. That was effective for getting pregnant. Using anything except some kind of active measures to avoid pregnancy doesn't pass my engineer brain and certainly doesn't pass my wife's Pharmacologist brain (i.e. she actually knows what she's talking about whereas I'm using applied probability theory w…

this article got me wondering where the partner app, potentially named drop?, that warns drip user's partners to be more careful in their choice of words, or lack thereof, during that special time where domestic emotions often devolve in to an irrational mess ending with a few days of sleeping on the couch until the drip has subsided

I've never known my partners to turn into an irrational mess because I said something they would otherwise be fine with. I actually find partners to be quite a bit more affectionate around those times. There's certainly an element of emotional volatility, but it swings both ways... And doesn't devolve into messes at all. Nothing that can't be sorted with a simple 'how are you feeling, anything I can do to help?'

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

#426

Post by freejazz »

calcifer wrote: post #15
metrix wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain?

Historically, "safety" referred to protection from physical harm. It has now expanded into psychological, emotional, economical realms. This had the (very much intended) effect of redefining "unsafe" from imminent and persistent threat to anything that makes me uncomfortable .

Really? Intentional infliction of emotional distress goes back to the late 1800s

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

#428

Post by pimlottc »

If you’re on iOS, you can track this information directly in Apple Health [0]. Their privacy policy [1] requires explicit opt-in for third party sharing.

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120356

1: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/health-app/

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

#429

Post by AngryData »

lesostep wrote: post #395
epanchin wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN: “A West Virginia prosecutor is warning women that a miscarriage could lead to criminal charges”. A gap in periods followed by their resumption could theoretically be enough to lead to prosecution.

A gap in periods could also mean that women body just decided not to bleed this month. It's not common, but it happens, some people have it naturally, some experience it while dieting or overstressed. The physical part of cycle is triggered by hormones, the hormones aren't always there. Surely they can't prosecute for that.

The US didn't get 25% of the world's prison population by not persecuting bullshit cases. If a prosecutor thinks they can get a charge to stick, even if by the barest hair, they will do it. How many people have been charged and thrown in jail over "hair analysis" despite being proven as bunk science multiple times over? With supposed experts failing to differentiate between human and dog hair. And they still use it today to push charges and cases.

If someone is poor and can't afford to fight the case, they are only going to get off by having a slam dunk alibi, and a person's own word is far from a slam dunk alibi. It is even worse with this because nobody has to actually be caught or arrested by a cop. They can pull the info from a database in bulk, send out 1,000 summons, and even if 95% of cases are thrown out, they spent so little money getting people into court that the remaining 5% will be a huge profit for the courts.

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

#430

Post by radicalbyte »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #419
radicalbyte wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because people are reading the first few words and thinking "this is an male nerd asking stupid ignorant questions". It's that or there are people who actually think that counting days is a good way to enable unprotected sex without a risk of baby. Which is absolutely isn't - it changes the risk to 2-5% a shot. Compared to around ~2% year for condoms alone.

It's worth pointing out that due to the nature of how contraceptive studies are done, it's remarkably easy to stay out of that 2% for condoms. (Namely, if you're planning on using condoms as your choice of contraceptive, actually use the condoms).

They can burst and slip off too. That's the problem. I'm anti-abortion* so we took extra measures to avoid the argument (my wife is Pro, and I although have no right to tell anyone else what to do with their body, it would probably have ended our relationship had she done it).

* For myself, I find that the Americans who try to force everyone else to follow their personal positions to be insane Authoritarian Fascists. Our society only works if people have freedom and personal choice.

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