Menstruation apps store excessive information | Hacker News Reader

Menstruation apps store excessive information

theguardian.com

32 pointsjimnotgym9 comments

https://www.privacyinternational.org/long-read/4316/we-asked...

The link to the report. Quite interesting.

Each and every time I read stories of apps storing, peeking, stealing or abusing user data, and/or their privacy more than is necessary, I always wonder where the alternative, non invasive alternative app developers are. Are they here? If not, where?

I think the reason this happens is largely because the "common" (non developer, non technical, non engineer etc) user demographic, because of services like FaceBook, Insta, TikTok etc, don't see a reason to pay for software. Therefore, if a developer wants to make money (especially if they're a solo developer) they tend to sometimes walk the less-ethical side of software dev and hoard / share data do make their effort a bit more worthwhile in terms of generating revenue.

It's also troubling to me that large companies like apple want to make large scale "anonymized" health data collection common place and "normal". Citing "huge leaps in medical science" as a reason to start mass data reporting on their users.

So it is easy to not harvest data but it is not easy to resist selling it on to make a living? Of the 100,000s of privacy flag waving developers, many of whose blogs I read, that describe the non Apple/Google/Facebook route, why are there so few known alternatives? This is a crisis that has consequences. At a recent televised hearing, someone in congress asked something along the lines of, will my children's children still be searching with Google and ordering from Amazon? Damn good question.

I suspect that it's because stated and revealed preferences are in divergence here. Stated preferences are that everyone wants no tracking at all. People do not care about data collection in general unless it is egregious (don't tell a teenage girl's dad she's pregnant) but those who do care about data collection care about it greatly. So there is a market for the high-privacy stuff but it is small. And there is a market for the rest that is big.

Any effort you make to go from the latter to the former nets you a dollar less. This is especially true because accidentally collecting data is easy (you build in sync between devices or something).

Yeah, it's a messy problem all together. This is a bit of a different tangent, but as someone who worked for one of the first Bitcoin / Ethereum transaction tracing startups a few years back - I think many of the people pointing to "privacy" in digital currencies are misguided. Right now, there are private companies already getting in on the consumer tx tracing business in crypto. The real clever ones charge the government and exchanges as "compliance" providers. Ironically, many of these new companies are directly related to or bankrolled by existing data-broker giants.

F-Droid (the Android "store" for FOSS) has two period-tracker apps available.

Check out F-Droid and GNU/Linux repositories.

You can make those observations about any mobile app, social network, free online services...

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