VANCOUVER - A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can move forward over alleged privacy breaches against a company that made an app to track users’ menstrual and fertility cycles. The ruling published online Friday says the action against Flo Health Inc. alleges the company shared users’ highly personal health information with third-parties, including Facebook, Google and other companies.
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Periods are awful to keep track of yourself, it’s not a perfect, “every 4 weeks for 5 days” thing. Those apps actually recalculate the beginning and end of a period when something abnormal happens, like stress moving the period back a few days. This way you don’t need to keep it in a personal calendar, which mind you, a lot of people don’t even have.
Btw, most apps do also more than just regular tracking, they can predict how bad blood flow will be, and if your periods are known to be rather painful, they can keep track and remind you when a day comes on which you’d need to pack a few extra painkillers.
Hard to argue with any of those points. Nice of you to kindly elaborate for people trying to blame the victims of the scheme.
Periods are never properly explained in school, a lot of people simply get taught by their mother, or survive with what little knowledge the biology textbook holds about them.
I cannot blame someone for not knowing how awfully complicated they are, when school at most teaches about the ideal period, not even mentioning how much can affect them, or how awful they can be for some people.
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I used these kinds of apps when I was a teenager. I could not keep up with a calendar - I tried but my cycles were too irregular to be predictable based on the calculations I could find in books and the internet. I’m transgender and found the entire experience unpleasant in a fairly intense way.
Those kinds of apps helped me immensely. Most of them offer some sort of discreet icon or password system - my parents were the type to read my diary/calendars. My periods are all over the place, and I was able to safely log a pattern in related pain/duration/quantity… most of them included links to places to find medical information. I found one that wasn’t pastel pink and just treated me like a person keeping track of their medical statistics. I got to feel neutral about a part of my body which I despised.
The problem is not that people are naive enough to hand over the information to a third party they can not trust. The problem is the paucity of information and resources for menstrual health. Periods are complicated and scary. When you’re a teenager, you’re not worried about data security - you’re worried about trying to make sure you know when your next cycle will start so that you don’t experience the hell that is bleeding through your pants in math class.
I especially wouldn’t recommend anyone in the a red state in the US to use a period tracker. States are serious about prison sentences for people seeking abortions and even miscarriages. If a state like Texas or South Carolina gets ahold of that information it’s going to ruin your life.