Millions of women use such applications. They can be sneaky
The FemTech space is growing stronger day by day. However, it turns out that using applications managing women's health carries a significant risk in terms of protecting the data entered. So what should you never do to avoid future problems?
FemTech as a tool for intimate surveillance?
The latest study, conducted by UCL and King's College London, clearly shows that Apps designed to monitor women's health expose them to unnecessary privacy and security risksdue to poor data processing practices.
This research was presented May 14 at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date of privacy practices in women's health apps.
A team of researchers took a closer look The 20 most popular women's health apps available on the Google Play Store. It turned out that the applications process huge amounts of data – this includes medical data, fertility data and menstrual information. They force women to provide confidential information that may put them at risk. Worse still, many pregnancy tracking apps required users to indicate whether they had had a miscarriage or abortion in the past. We don't need to remind anyone that this type of data can pose a real security threat in countries where abortion is a crime.
Some applications did not have the function to delete entered data, or effectively hindered their removal.
The research conclusions turned out to be alarming – with the exception of one application, user data was not properly protected and could easily fall into the hands of third parties.
Women's health apps collect sensitive data about your menstrual cycle, sex life and pregnancy status, as well as personal data such as names and email addresses (…). The consequences of leaking such sensitive data could result in monitoring and discrimination in the workplace, health insurance, intimate partner violence and criminal blackmail (…)
– warns Dr. Ruba Abu-Salma, principal investigator of the study from King's College London
Apps collect sensitive data and then fail to protect it
The study proved a contradiction between the wording of the privacy policy and the functions of the application. It exposed flawed consent mechanisms and the secret collection of sensitive data for sharing with third parties.
Apps are useful, they just need to be improved
Please note that these applications are very important. They help women manage various aspects of their health, so under no circumstances are we asking them to remove these apps. We appeal to creators, because they are responsible for ensuring that when designing, they take into account and respect the unique sensitivity of data collected directly from users.
– says Dr Mark Warner, UCL Computer Science
However, the case is not hopeless. Apps for women have very useful functions and are worth using, because they are very helpful in managing women's health. You just need to put a little more effort into designing them. Researchers, wanting to help developers improve privacy policies, have developed a policy system, which can be used in applications. It can be customized or used to manually or automatically evaluate an app's privacy policies.
Above all, this type of research drew attention to an important problem that concerns most health and fitness applications, becoming an important voice in the discussion.
See: Are you a woman? Then you must have them – the best apps for women
See: 5 apps from Google Play that will make exercising from home easier
