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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Intimate data, including when people have had sex, is being shared with Facebook, a study from Privacy International has suggested.
It included details such as what contraception was used, when periods were due and the type of symptoms experienced.
Since the investigation, one app said it was changing its privacy policies.
Menstruation apps collect some of the most intimate data imaginable - from general health, to information about sex, moods, what the user eats, drinks and even what sanitary products she uses.
In exchange for this, the app will offer the user the dates of the month she is most fertile or when to expect her next period.
Sharing to Facebook happens via the social network's software development kit (SDK), tools that can be used by apps to help them make money by reaching advertisers who, in turn, provide users with personalised ads.
PI found the most popular apps in this category - Period Tracker, Period Track Flo and Clue Period Tracker did not share data with Facebook.
But others - such as Maya by Plackal Tech (which has 5 million downloads on Google Play), MIA by Mobapp Development Limited (1 million downloads) and My Period Tracker by Linchpin Health (more than 1 million downloads) - did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @07:22AM
I use apps from F-Droid when possible as well. But phones are pretty opaque about the difference between data that's private and data that's shared with the world. I'm not sure how to do better about that: any app that is granted internet access can share its data with the world and that's pretty much every app (in part because they want internet access for ads).
Maybe app stores could require explicit disclosure of privacy impacts. That is, something like "this app shares all data you enter with advertising partners" vs. "this app's data only leaves the device as encrypted backups" vs. "this app's data is private to your device" (erm, with better wording and probably a color-coded badge). At least if the app store page had a badge like that there would be some possibility people would be informed the privacy choices they were making, even if most people would ignore it. Currently, there's no reasonable way for a common user to suspect that an app is exfiltrating their data other than somehow being informed by a more technical friend or family member of the (justified) paranoia that probably every single app is. In practice, such a scheme would probably be too difficult to enforce and too easily ignored.