LIES, DAMN LIES, AND PRIVACY PROMISES

Health apps and other consumer technologies collect massive amounts of sensitive data, including but not limited to information about users’ reproductive lives. As a result, consumer choices—especially for menstruation tracking applications—are at least partly driven by privacy promises in advertising and privacy policies. But there is a problem: whether these promises are grounded in reality can often only be revealed by complex analyses outside the capabilities of the majority of consumers and, even then, may be unknowable in any definitive sense. This essay explores this problem in the context of menstruation tracking applications and post-Dobbs legal developments that implicate reproductive data.

In it, we question the adequacy of existing laws and regulations and the limitations of even the most robust proposed legislation and underscore that if we cannot solve the problem of privacy lies, any hard-fought reforms will be hollow.