Can anyone tell me why this would be as much of a problem for safety as they are saying?
The only thing I can see happening is easier selling of pads and tampons during a certain phase of the moon. Apparently this is what the article suggests too, that certain things are easier to sell at a certain point in the cycle.
It’d be embarrassing if someone knew, not dangerous. And even that much feels weird to me for a very well known biological function.
Woman gets pregnant, flagged as such in business intelligence database, she doesn't start buying baby stuff and instead travels out of state, suddenly treated as criminal suspect.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
I cannot fathom why you think that highly personal data like this should be sold or shared with law enforcement.
I’m not saying it should be shared. I’m just struggling to come up with truly terrifying things you can do with the information.
That whole article is going mental over the fact that a cop can run a nationwide search on license plates of all things? What’d be the point of running it on a select few states?
“I’ve established that the suspect is not in Texas.”
CNN: “A West Virginia prosecutor is warning women that a miscarriage could lead to criminal charges”.
A gap in periods followed by their resumption could theoretically be enough to lead to prosecution.
While it's true that CNN ran an article like that, the underlying claim has been formally rebutted by the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association, who clarified that:
> Women who experience miscarriage are not required to notify law enforcement and should not fear prosecution…recent public statements do not reflect the consensus of West Virginia prosecutors.
https://wchstv.com/news/local/wva-prosecuting-attorneys-deno...
As far as I understand, the US judicial system is open. How many women have already been held accountable for miscarriages?
A gap in periods could also mean that women body just decided not to bleed this month. It's not common, but it happens, some people have it naturally, some experience it while dieting or overstressed. The physical part of cycle is triggered by hormones, the hormones aren't always there.
Surely they can't prosecute for that.
The US didn't get 25% of the world's prison population by not persecuting bullshit cases. If a prosecutor thinks they can get a charge to stick, even if by the barest hair, they will do it. How many people have been charged and thrown in jail over "hair analysis" despite being proven as bunk science multiple times over? With supposed experts failing to differentiate between human and dog hair. And they still use it today to push charges and cases.
If someone is poor and can't afford to fight the case, they are only going to get off by having a slam dunk alibi, and a person's own word is far from a slam dunk alibi. It is even worse with this because nobody has to actually be caught or arrested by a cop. They can pull the info from a database in bulk, send out 1,000 summons, and even if 95% of cases are thrown out, they spent so little money getting people into court that the remaining 5% will be a huge profit for the courts.
The problem here is definitely not that someone has information about who is on their period.
Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spending as children age through different phases are quite predictable and the spending is huge and touches almost every aspect of the person's life.
The article is a mess, mixing everything up in a single issue, without saying anything about scale or frequency of them happening:
- Targeted advertising.
- Job prospects and workplace monitoring.
- Insurance discrimination.
- Abortion-related issues.
- Cyberstalking.
Targeted advertising is weird thing, but I believe it's not the particularly important issue here. At least I fail to see the severity of seeing more ads for cosmetics (or sweets or home loans or whatever children stuff) correlated with one's hormonal cycle. I'm not saying it's certainly not an issue (or is an issue), but I don't think it's particularly high on most people list of ethical questions to ponder about. Could be considered benign, could be mildly unethical, but most likely not a huge deal. The way I understand it, much worse problems are in the rest of the list.
It seems that - according to the research linked by the article - some people seem to try to step around the legal barriers on discrimination. While those folks can't (legally) directly discriminate on pregnancy status, they use statistical models to discriminate on a probability of such status, based on the data they can currently buy from app developers. Or maybe not the models but a self-reported goal of becoming pregnant - as it's not a pregnancy per se, so I guess they consider it' s a fair game until a lawmaker or a court says otherwise.
Plus there's also an issue, that some governments have different ideas on personhood, and try to equate abortions (and even miscarriages) with homicide, then try to detect "crime" based on this data, is certainly a major concern.
And there's also something about cyberstalking. I can't say I entirely get it, but a distressed mind can do really weird shit.
Summarized:
1. Menstrual cycle data is sold publicly and is not currently considered a PHI.
2. Some people use this data in ways other people could consider unethical.
3. The article doesn't mention how much of it is arguably harmless or less harmful (such as targeting ads based on predicted hormonal changes) and how much of it is severe abuse. It merely mentions the potential of such abuse, but I haven't found anything about its scale.
I could be, of course, wrong about it all. This is just my current understanding of it after reading for a bit. (My initial understanding was much less than this, like GP I just wondered "there are millions of menstruating people, how is data when they have their periods could be possibly so much valuable to be compared to a gold mine?" as IIRC individual demographic and behavioral data is generally of a very limited value.)
I think it becomes more an issue when you consider that in these apps, people likely also enter things like prescription medications they take, what kind of contraception they use, if any. Additionally, if this data is being sold to advertisers, and a user of the app becomes pregnant, it is possible that data could be used to determine that the user might be pregnant before they even know. This has the potential by itself to become an issue, especially for teens and in cultures where people take having sex outside of wedlock to extremes (as in responding violently to it) by starting to show that person and potentially their other family members on the same internet connection ads related to pregnancy/baby stuff
> things like prescription medications they take, what kind of contraception they use.. determine that the user might be pregnant
Those are PHI, and Google and other big companies wont dare to touch it with 10 foot pole.
And the other part of your argument is so far into hypothetical space. Just because someone gets ads on certain thing doesn't mean the thing is real. These systems hallucinate all the time.
>Can anyone tell me why this would be as much of a problem for safety as they are saying?
The size of the problem is directly correlated with their level of funding. What else can they say?
>The only thing I can see happening is easier selling of pads and tampons during a certain phase of the moon.
No, with that attitude you definitely won't get a research grants.