Majority of period-tracking app share incredibly sensitive data with Facebook and bottom-feeding analytics companies

It has been 0 days since Facebook's last privacy scandal.

The majority of period tracking apps transmit sensitive data to Facebook the minute you open them, before you interact with them at all, thanks to the common use of Facebook's analytics tool (which nominally gives app developers a free way to track their products' use, but which, not incidentally, allows FB to harvest all that usage data).

The data that period-tracking apps share is often incredibly sensitive, including the last time the user had sex, which birth control they use, and so on. Some apps allow you to keep a private diary of your menstrual and sexual activities. This is also sent to Facebook.

It's basically a rerun of the ghastly revelations about fertility tracking apps from 2016, except that now it's three years later and the companies involved have learned not one fucking thing from that scandal.

One company, MIA Fem, threatened to sue Privacy International and Buzzfeed over Privacy International's handling of its unconvincing denials. Other vendors, like Plackal Tech, makers of the Maya app, minimized the concerns raised by researchers, suggesting that they simply don't take the issue seriously.

Facebook is just for starters. The same apps often shared data with less well-known, even slimier analytics firms who largely fly under regulators' and lawmakers' radar (Facebook, for all its failings, is full of people who are terrified that some antitrust or privacy investigation is going to cost the company millions or billions and that they will face the blame -- but small startups that are one quarter away from going broke have no incentive to think about the longterm). Read the rest