this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024

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Manstrual cycles (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

166 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are downsides with downloading their app just to input bad data, but it's a fun thought.

edit: While we're at it we might as well offer an alternative app to people.

I posted in [email protected] to collect recommendations for better apps

The post: https://lemmy.ca/post/32877620

Leading Recommendation from the comments

The leading recommendation seems to be Drip (bloodyhealth.gitlab.io)

Summarizing what people shared:

accessible: it is on F-droid, Google Play, & iOS App Store
does not allow any third-party tracking
the project got support from "PrototypeFund & Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Superrr Lab and Mozilla"
Listed features:
- "Your data, your choice: Everything you enter stays on your device"
- "Not another cute, pink app: drip is designed with gender inclusivity in mind."
- "Your body is not a black box: drip is transparent in its calculations and encourages you to think for yourself."
- "Track what you like: Just your period, or detect your fertility using the symptothermal method."

Their Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dripapp

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

iOS has a first party health app that has menstrual tracking. I’m under the impression Apple takes data security seriously. If you don’t, self hosted is probably best.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've been using it to track my poops.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Eat more fiber for extra data

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago (6 children)

I have a reminder app that randomizes reminders for a medical issue I'm dealing with.

Sounds like I'll be dealing with two medical issues that app will require now.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm so sorry ladies, but you had me until the Ts & Cs. This app is a privacy nightmare. I would put all of this energy into finding or crowd funding a better alternative.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

I signed up for the app and there are so many dark patterns used in the signup process it's insulting.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I'm doing my part!

[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 days ago

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

These symptoms might actually be related to the 12k mountain trail run I did yesterday after work, and I'm pretty sure the bleeding is because I got scratched by a spiky bush, but you cannot be too careful fellas

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Day 1065: still feeling fatigue. Poor sleep habits or longest period ever?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 days ago (1 children)

people will do anything but search for an alternative

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago (4 children)

...how do you mean?

Obviously we're not going to get everyone to download a FOSS period tracker, as nice as that would be -- they're already invested in the ones they're using, and no doubt it will have features and usability improvements the FOSS one doesn't, usually thanks to some network service that is fundamentally incompatible with the FOSS philosophy. That's almost always how these things go.

We should definitely be telling more people about F-Droid, but let's not get our hopes up. Socialism is about protecting everyone, even people who don't share your views, even if those views are objectively correct.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

We should definitely be telling more people about F-Droid, but let’s not get our hopes up

Accessibility (not being on FDroid only) was one of the things I was looking for when looking for recommendations. Thankfully the leading recommendation is on Google Play & iOS App Store :) I have edited the post above with more details

Drip (bloodyhealth.gitlab.io)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There was an IT Crowd episode on the Manstrual Cycle

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

Oh that's what I was remembering! Aunt Irma

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Post text:

Dear men I need you to go download an app called "Flo" and start using it chaotically. Don't ask anyone how to use it. Just use it. The more, the better. Let's Christmas tree that data.

As a software developer who loves to screw the data and a person who will do ANYTHING can to protect women for the next 4 years, I am so excited to begin tracking my manstrual cycle

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What's the point of spamming one specific menstrual tracker / women's health app? Lack of better hobbies? Or is there some controversy around the company behind it? Or just general state of freedom and surveillance in the USA?

[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 days ago (6 children)

The idea is that they'll be used to track pregnancy and hurt people in certain states. Chaos will help the situation.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Computer databases are kind of purpose-built to organize a lot of (arbitrary) information. I seriously doubt this kind of chaos is going to make even the slightest difference. It's probably just giving people some false sense of security while any information that's stored in any cloud can still be retrieved. And effortlessly be matched to whomever they like to oppress. At least if it's associated with some account, email or specific phone.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (8 children)

"A bunch of new accounts posting obviously worthless data joined about the same time. Disregard them."

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I agree with the first half... It's very easy to ingest and sift through insane amounts of data

What isn't easy is doing so usefully. Yes, if you can link the account to a person, it's trivial to pull up their records. Linking is easier said than done - it's doable, but to make it scale you have to get the full records of device IDs, link them back to a number, then link them to a person. Minimum, you'd need the telco's data

That's a staggering amount of work - it's much easier to do it if the app also has phone numbers, but even then where do you link it? The telco's have an account holder (which often will be a family member), 50 separate dmvs might have more accurate links, but they're largely legacy systems that will be a nightmare to work with. It's doable, but it's hard

Then you get to distribute this super extensive database of personal information - at this point it's prism, and probably already has most of this data - they'd just have to ingest period data too

But we don't give that kind of access to local police, because then every government would end up with it. And that's a big and genuine security threat... But also a very unwieldy thing to work with. More data means more man hours to work with

The other direction is far more practical - if you start by looking at the data, you can tie it back to a person if they match a pattern. Then you can look at just the records you do have, and pay Amazon or the credit agencies for more. A human can easily investigate another human, because we are great with unstructured data, and computers aren't

A chaotic data source means more bad leads to manually chase down. Man hours are limited, and people have morale - if a cop wastes an hour on a lead that ends with a spare phone or a single man, they're going to complain and drag their feet. If productivity and morale are in the garbage, that's going to lead to pushback. If it happens enough, the message at the top will be "this program doesn't work"

It would be far better to find the patterns and target them methodically, but even chaotic garbage is effective - data analysis isn't easy to automate, it's very expensive to do when accuracy matters and they're poisoning the data source

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

We'd need to identify some threat model to continue the discussion. I don't know what people are afraid of. I'd say the other way round is more likely. For example a state decides to pursue people terminating a pregnancy. They can use data from telecommunications providers to find out which phones cross the border to the neighboring state and return the same or the next day. Disregard people who do it regularly, and then correlate that data to other factors. Like pull up the menstrual tracker account that was accessed by that specific IP address.

We know since Snowden that some agencies do similar things (supposedly for terrorism) and generally a lot of logs are kept. Also we have lots of automatic license plate readers and additional surveillance available.

Aside from that, it is spread that Amazon knows if you're pregnant before you do. They could also buy the data who is interested in romper suits, supplements or other specific things and then isn't. I suppose it's not exactly about that... More that Amazon have some good heuristics and algorithms to predict things from general shopping behaviour. And you could also do the same thing to menstrual tracking. The cycle is pretty regular. And then it usually stops once someone gets pregnant. And I believe after that it takes some time to settle down to a very regular pattern again. You could easily detect that with an algorithm. And simultaneously get rid of artificial (spammed) data that doesn't follow what is possible. Probably takes a skilled programmer like 3 weeks and then you can tell if an account owner is real, and probably even if they take some contraceptive or not, due to the slight variations. And if an app has some recommendations features, they're likely to already include the groundworks for data analyzing.

Ultimately, the government already analyzes and stores the data from telco providers. And it's always easier to combine several factors to make good predictions, than to rely on a single source. And I'd say this kind of surveillance has to be done automatically, anyways. It's almost never feasible to sift through databases manually.