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Menstrual tracking app data is a ‘gold mine’ for advertisers that risks women’s safety

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  • I couldn't find a good one, so I'm open to recommendations

    Look at the other comments, apparently drip should be the goto open source app.

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    Because its effort. We have to get the average person to care about their security and privacy before they will bother using these alternatives. It's much easier for them to download a popular one off an app store and have the data stick with them, than it is to download f-droid, find the right app, make sure its still supported and setup their own data backup.

  • Because its effort. We have to get the average person to care about their security and privacy before they will bother using these alternatives. It's much easier for them to download a popular one off an app store and have the data stick with them, than it is to download f-droid, find the right app, make sure its still supported and setup their own data backup.

    People don't give a shit, and prefer to stay uninformed. Maybe more Darwin awards are necessary?

    Edit:
    Maybe that was out of line, but I'm just so fucking tired of people who choose to be ignorant.

  • People are mentioning drip, and that's on the Play Store. It's literally the same amount of effort as installing a surveillance app.

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    Drip looks to be available on Google Play, App Store and F-Droid.

    It probably has a lot to do with informing people.

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    Periodical.
    Local storage only, f-droid.

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    Besides drip, Euki (github) is another option on both the play store and iOS.

    Note that both of these options are maintained by tiny teams with limited resources.

  • Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

    Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff

    Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

    This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

    The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

    They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

    I happen to be a penis owner.

    So what would happen if I were to install and use such a monthly tracker app and pretend I've been having regular monthlies for a while, then suddenly I miss a couple periods, then suddenly start having periods again?

    Would the cops come beating my door down claiming I had an abortion? 🤔

    Fuck this dystopian mass surveillance shit!

  • Besides drip, Euki (github) is another option on both the play store and iOS.

    Note that both of these options are maintained by tiny teams with limited resources.

    tiny teams with limited resources.

    If the apps work as intended, it doesn't really matter.

  • People are mentioning drip, and that's on the Play Store. It's literally the same amount of effort as installing a surveillance app.

    Does drip pay to have their app at the top of the list? Because that's about how far most people look

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    I get what you’re trying to say, but this is basically just roundabout victim blaming. Women shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not someone is going to weaponize data on their menstrual cycle against them. Yes it is good to lock your door at night, but ultimately you don’t blame somebody for getting robbed just because they didn't lock it. You blame the thief.

    Not everybody is as aware of privacy issues as the rest of us. We have to help them, not berate them.

  • People don't give a shit, and prefer to stay uninformed. Maybe more Darwin awards are necessary?

    Edit:
    Maybe that was out of line, but I'm just so fucking tired of people who choose to be ignorant.

    Everybody’s a bad ass talking about Darwin awards when that’s something they understand, but suddenly you will expect sympathy when it’s something you don’t. Maybe try havinga little more empathy for the people of the world who are not as aware of how bad privacy has gotten. Believe it or not, we are of a minority perspective. A very small one at that.

    I’m more inclined to believe it’s partially a failure on our part to educate people, but mostly the issue is that it’s not a fair fight. You are expecting the average person to successfully overcome the resources and influence of sometimes decades old, billion dollar, multinational companies and governments. But I guess it’s a lot easier to just call everybody who doesn’t take this as seriously as we do a dumbass. Certainly allowed you to wipe your hands of it and act smug that’s for sure.

  • Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

    Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff

    Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

    This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

    The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

    They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

    Do women need an app for this? Surely a piece of paper would work just as well, and have a 0% chance of selling your data.

  • Everybody’s a bad ass talking about Darwin awards when that’s something they understand, but suddenly you will expect sympathy when it’s something you don’t. Maybe try havinga little more empathy for the people of the world who are not as aware of how bad privacy has gotten. Believe it or not, we are of a minority perspective. A very small one at that.

    I’m more inclined to believe it’s partially a failure on our part to educate people, but mostly the issue is that it’s not a fair fight. You are expecting the average person to successfully overcome the resources and influence of sometimes decades old, billion dollar, multinational companies and governments. But I guess it’s a lot easier to just call everybody who doesn’t take this as seriously as we do a dumbass. Certainly allowed you to wipe your hands of it and act smug that’s for sure.

    I admit that was out of line, but for fucks sake, there are so many stupid people doing stupid things it's unbearable. Voting for Trump for example. And the Russian people supporting the war on Ukraine.

  • I get what you’re trying to say, but this is basically just roundabout victim blaming. Women shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not someone is going to weaponize data on their menstrual cycle against them. Yes it is good to lock your door at night, but ultimately you don’t blame somebody for getting robbed just because they didn't lock it. You blame the thief.

    Not everybody is as aware of privacy issues as the rest of us. We have to help them, not berate them.

    I admit that was out of line, but for fucks sake, there are so many stupid people doing stupid things it’s unbearable. Voting for Trump for example. And the Russian people supporting the war on Ukraine.
    I'm just so fucking tired of how ignorant people choose to be.

  • Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

    Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff

    Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

    This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

    The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

    They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

    I mean there are at least 2 apps for that in F-Droid. It's just that most people are FOSS illiterate and only if a big corpo give them shit then they trust it.

  • I happen to be a penis owner.

    So what would happen if I were to install and use such a monthly tracker app and pretend I've been having regular monthlies for a while, then suddenly I miss a couple periods, then suddenly start having periods again?

    Would the cops come beating my door down claiming I had an abortion? 🤔

    Fuck this dystopian mass surveillance shit!

    I happen to be a penis owner.

    That's like 95% of Lemmy.

  • For christ sake, is there no open source option for such a simple task?

    Edit:
    2 people here could point to drip within 15 minutes of my post, and a third to the fact there are options on F-droid. So why the fuck don't women just use that?
    Well i guess the ones with harmful advertising have better graphics or somemeting. Or the fact they allow advertising makes them more visible on google play. And you probably can't even get drip on iPhones.

    So why the fuck don’t women just use that?

    They probably don't know about it. If I search "period tracker" on Google Play, Drip is in about 40th place in the results. That's several screens down, past a bunch of search suggestions, and the parts where it's open source, on-device, and optionally encrypted aren't clear until I tap on it and read the description.

    And you probably can’t even get drip on iPhones.

    There's some irony in a comment dealing with people making decisions that are against their interests because they're insufficiently informed speculating incorrectly about something like this when it's easy to check. Drip is, in fact available for iPhone.

  • Do women need an app for this? Surely a piece of paper would work just as well, and have a 0% chance of selling your data.

    Do people need an app for taking notes? Or a calendar?

    Sure, I used to do it on paper for many years. But it's much more convenient to track it on my phone, which I have almost always with me. That way I can check whether I'm likely to be bleeding heavily before making plans with my friends to go swimming that day or on a long hike without access to a toilet.

    Also many women don't just track the blood flow but also other data like temperature, cervix and cervical mucus. This helps calculate the most fertile days. It's much easier to let an app do that.

  • I admit that was out of line, but for fucks sake, there are so many stupid people doing stupid things it's unbearable. Voting for Trump for example. And the Russian people supporting the war on Ukraine.

    Not knowing how to install F Droid/to look for open source projects for sensitive data is not the same as voting for Trump or supporting Russia over Ukraine. The latter are taking bad information/prejudices and acting on them. The other people simply are not aware of the issue, or how serious of an issue personal privacy has become more broadly. Comparing them to MAGA and calling them stupid is not going to help them.

    I bet if I looked at your smart phone or computer I would see plenty of services you use that compromise your privacy. Should I call you an ignorant hypocrite and berate you as well?

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    A
    An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It's like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness ("temperature") when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time. But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It's a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g. ollama run gemma3:4b >>> /set parameter temperature 0 >>> what is a leaf You will get the same answer every single time.
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    I believed they were doing such things against budding competitors long before the LLM era. My test is simple. Replace it with China. Would the replies be the opposite of what you've recieved so far? The answer is yes. Absolutely people would be frothing at the mouth about China being bad actors. Western tech bros are just as paranoid, they copy off others, they steal ideas. When we do it it's called "innovation".
  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    Got it, at that point (extremely high voltage) you'd need suppression at the panel. Which I would hope people have inline, but not expect like an LVD.
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    I’m in the EU and PII definitely IS “a thing” here, Then let me be more clear: It is not a thing in EU law. With due respect, the level of intellectual functioning, in this case reading comprehension, you display is incompatible with being an IT professional in any country. If you are not trolling, then you should consult a physician.
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    J
    This is why they are businessmen and not politicians or influencers
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

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    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry