Let’s look at Google, because it likely has more data on you than anyone else. And you can be forced to give them whatever data you have, too. If abortion is illegal where you live and law enforcement is investigating you for possibly getting one, even the most privacy-centric company can be forced to give law enforcement whatever data they have on you. You can delete an app, but that won’t make an entire ecosystem built on knowing as much as possible about you disappear. But the truth is that period tracker apps are very low on the list of things you should worry about when it comes to online privacy and abortions. They specifically deal with reproductive health, and deleting an app gives people what appears to be a fast and simple solution and a feeling of agency. It’s understandable why people are focusing on period apps. I’m all set when it comes to abortion data now, right? That data can still be accessed if someone gets control of the device it’s on, but that’s also true for paper calendars. You can also use apps that don’t upload your information to a cloud, as Consumer Reports suggested. But that doesn’t mean that data is completely protected, as I’ll explain later.

You might feel better about those because they aren’t expressly for period tracking, and Google and Apple don’t send your data to third parties like some of those period apps do. Digital calendars exist, too, like Google’s Calendar and Apple’s iCal. If you keep track of your cycle on, say, a paper calendar, that data isn’t going to be sent to third parties or stored in some company’s cloud for law enforcement to access. Period apps, smartphones, and even the internet have only been around for a fraction of that time. People have been menstruating for as long as people have existed. Are there other ways to track my period that might be more secure than a period app? While some period trackers are better than others, the only way to be sure that no one can get anything about you from a period app is not to use them at all. Since a draft opinion indicating that Roe would be reversed leaked in May, and period apps got more scrutiny than perhaps ever before, many of them have scrambled to assure users that their data is safe or that they are implementing additional protections. Glow was dinged for “serious privacy and basic security failures.” Stardust shared user phone numbers with a third party, and its “end-to-end encryption” claims have been walked back. Flo was once caught sending data to various third parties including Facebook and Google, despite privacy policies indicating that it wouldn’t. That said, period tracker or fertility apps have a bad reputation when it comes to privacy, and they deserve it. The data from a period tracker app will only tell them so much, and it will only tell them the information you’ve given it. There are countless and more effective ways that interested parties can track your pregnancy status (expectant parents buy a lot of things, so knowing when someone gets pregnant to target them with ads can be lucrative) and law enforcement can do even more if they’re investigating you for getting an abortion in a state where it’s illegal (more on that later).

The current anxiety about period apps is understandable, given the purpose that they serve. The longer answer is that when it comes to online privacy and health privacy, deleting a period tracker app is like taking a teaspoon of water out of the ocean. If you want to keep your reproductive health and menstrual data private - especially if you’re worried about that data being part of a criminal investigation - don’t put it in an app. This seems to be the biggest question people have about online privacy with regard to the Roe reversal. We’ve answered some of those questions here, from how scared you should be of period apps to what you can do to keep your private life private … as much as that’s possible, anyway. If you’ve never cared all that much about how and why you’re constantly being surveilled online before, you probably have a lot of questions about how all of this works now - especially when it comes to reproductive health data and what can be used against you. And the period tracker app Flo is introducing an “ anonymous mode” that is supposed to let users delete any identifiable information from their profiles. Google, for example, recently announced that it will automatically delete location data if people visit medical facilities, including abortion clinics (it still, of course, collects that data). Wade and subsequent criminalizing of abortion in several states, as the larger public realizes that the data those services collect could be used to prosecute abortion seekers.

Tech companies are scrambling to adjust their data privacy practices in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v.

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