Young people are outsmarting period tracking apps

This essay was originally published on The Sidebar, Mozilla's Substack.

Trigger warning: Discussion of pregnancy loss.

Open up TikTok on any given day and you'll find confident young women openly discussing their periods. They might recognise a low mood is due to the luteal phase or feel amazing because they are ovulating. They acknowledge the importance of self-care and that everybody is different. Periods are normal, but there's no such thing as a normal period!

For me, a peri-menopausal woman who was surprised by my period every month until trying to get pregnant well into my 30s, this self-awareness and desire of young women to understand their own bodies and cycles is a source of great feminist pride. It is welcome progress from the shame and secrecy traditionally surrounding menstruation education.

A craving for knowledge and understanding has made cycle tracking apps very popular with women and girls from a young age. I didn't know about tracking apps until I was 17", says Gen Z'er Sara*. Some users are keen to share cycle information with their partner and friends to encourage understanding around mood swings, or share funny stories about loud notifications alerting all to the consistency of their discharge today.

Cycle tracking apps are certainly having a moment. There are hundreds available on app stores, from simple calendars to full hormone testing. One study found that the top three cycle tracking apps dominating the market were downloaded 250 million times globally.

Often framed as simple period prediction tools that aid or avoid pregnancy, most usage of cycle tracking apps relates to everyday mental and physical wellbeing. By logging a wide range of symptoms and events, women and girls can track mood, energy levels, manage health conditions and work with their bodies. Apps can provide health and nutrition information as well as recommendations for exercise and meditation.

Cycle tracking apps are also the poster girl of what is going wrong with women's rights today. The dark side of cycle tracking apps are just that - the tracking. The two-fold threat of increased reproductive surveillance and the sale of sensitive data for advertising is in danger of outweighing the benefits of trusting these apps with information about our bodies and state of mind.

It has been three years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ended the federal protection for abortion in the U.S. Many experts at the time urged women to delete cycle tracking apps in the face of the threat of tracking data being used to prove" an abortion via a missed period. But is this actually what women are doing? Or, are they finding alternative solutions, workarounds, and new ways to engage with these tools?

Apps that were ahead of the game in terms of a good privacy commitment and track record saw a benefit. Ana Ramirez, co-executive director of Euki, a cycle tracking app and information service remembers, Our largest download surges were immediately after Roe fell, when Euki received media coverage as a standout privacy period tracker..."

Amy Thompson, founder of the Moody Month app focused on improving mental health observed, Moody, like much of the industry, saw users delete apps post-Roe v. Wade, but increased media coverage also drove new downloads."

So while many did delete, tracking apps were not abandoned entirely. Ana explains, People are hungry for a way to track their sexual and reproductive health without giving up their privacy. In this political climate, period trackers aren't just tools - they're lifelines."

Concerns reached the U.K. where increased surveillance, investigation and prosecution of women suspected of illegal" abortions after pregnancy loss added to a climate of fear, mistrust and misinformation. Azure*, 16, suspected of the app she uses, It's dodgy and sends information to the government. It tracks to see if you've had an illegal abortion or something."

Chella Quint, founder of Period Positive and author of Own Your Period saw increased awareness of data privacy risks reaching many U.K. Gen Z'ers in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned which affected their use of cycle tracking apps, Some people now use workarounds like avoiding login, using a Notes app instead, or tracking their cycles in a paper diary. Others - both adults and children - are aware of the risks but still find the apps too useful to give up."

Rose*, 19, agreed I think most [people] are aware of the issues surrounding privacy and data collection...it's just a bit overwhelming and I've kind of just accepted that it will happen in one way or another."

High-profile cases in the U.S. related to data breaches and apps selling or sharing customer data with third parties also led users to seek out privacy respecting alternatives, which pushed companies to raise the bar for stricter privacy standards and win back user trust.

For 20-year-old Ella* based in the U.K., a concern over the sale of data by an app in the U.S. prompted a switch of trackers to another one based in Europe that promoted its privacy credentials. Another popular reason to switch is discovering the company behind an app is owned by men - female-founded companies are preferred. While switching apps is common, it is a source of frustration as the data cannot be ported to another app and years of tracking data can be lost. In a competitive market, some apps have capitalised on this by offering to port all the data from another app if the user sends screenshots of calendars.

At a bare minimum cycle tracking apps should not be selling data. But the difference between selling and sharing gets blurry. If it's in the cloud, it's being shared with the cloud provider. If advertising on social media, it's being shared with the platform. Synching with a wearable? It's being shared. It's almost impossible to get around this in the digital economy. And the law barely keeps up as Amy Thompson from Moody Month observed, While anonymisation/pseudonymisation frameworks exist in major privacy laws, enforcement and implementation standards often lag behind evolving privacy risks."

It can be difficult to comprehend why anyone would be so interested in this info in the first place. As Nat*, 42 from the UK said, who cares if all the data leaks, who cares if anyone knows my periods, when I have sex, when I go swimming etc?"

A report by the Minderoo Centre for Democracy and Technology outlines the value of knowing if someone is trying to become pregnant as pregnancy is a life event that drastically changes shopping habits. Cycle-based advertising seeks to tailor adverts based on menstrual cycle phases, suggesting that hormone fluctuations can make people susceptible to products at different times, such as clothing and cosmetics in the first half of the cycle when women might be ovulating and feeling good. Either way, someone is commodifying aspects of your body while you are in the process of trying to understand it.

Some may not care deeply about this. For those more likely to be surveilled or face barriers to care - such as people of colour, young people, people on welfare, those living in restrictive U.S. states, menstruating people who do not identify as cis women - they are more guarded about their privacy and what happens to their data. Ana Ramirez from Euki believes these are the people who should be at the forefront in developer's minds, Power lies in designing with - not just for - the people most often dismissed as edge cases.' Centering privacy starts with centering those most impacted."

Women have always been watched but that is not going to stop us trying to understand what is going on with our bodies. We'll find workarounds and seek out high privacy standards. We may track our periods for fertility reasons, but there is so much more to it than that. Which makes sense because we, as women and human beings, are much more than that.

*Names have been changed

Lucy Purdon is the founder of Courage Everywhere, a consultancy advising organisations on the responsible development of technology to advance human rights, democracy and gender justice. Lucy has provided strategic advice, policy development and original research for organisations ranging from tech startups to the United Nations. She has worked in civil society roles for over 13 years, including as a Senior Tech Policy Fellow at Mozilla Foundation. She writes the weekly newsletter The Prompt, analysing the latest tech news and trends.

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