Mozilla finds 18 of 25 popular reproductive health apps share your data It's official: your period and/or pregnancy tracker will probably share your data with law enforcement. Eighteen of 25 reproductive health apps and wearable devices reviewed by Mozilla received a *Privacy Not Included warning label – meaning they are problematic when it comes to protecting users' privacy and security. This is …
I wonder how much a company producing these services can do by just not being based in the US/Poland/Saudi Arabia and thus being able to ignore law enforcement or court requests.
I know many European businesses typically laugh when some American lawyer moron thinks an appeal to the DMCA works outside the US, why would that be different for requests of user data? The worst that could probably happen is that you may have to stop advertising or direct sales in the US so you can claim your service is not intended for use in the US.
Any lawyers with international experience in the house?
"I know many European businesses typically laugh when some American lawyer moron thinks an appeal to the DMCA works outside the US,"
DMCA is one of the US horrible exports that other countries have taken up as a wonderful thing so it's good to check if your country has embraced it or not. Using "lawyer" and "moron" in the same sentence is redundant and I have to agree with the sentiment and point out that it extends to judges who believe that their jurisdiction extends beyond US borders.
The view from the US supreme "court" is that women are breeder cattle. So much for the "rights" of women. When "rights" can be taken away by any means those are not "rights".
I wonder how many of those apps are based in the USA. Probably nearly all of them, apart from the mentioned Swedish one. These apps are the Stasi agents of our time, snooping and informing, all within what is called the "framework of the law". We've seen what law means. We've seen slavery laws in the USA. We've seen the laws to disenfranchise voters in the USA. Now it is coming to get people who thought it would never get them.
The view of the US Supreme Court is that the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, so there is therefore no Constitutional right to abortion within it.
If you wish there to be a Constitutional right to abortion, there is a procedure for making that happen, but it's not just getting a majority of judges agree to pretend it is in there already and to declare it to be so. Creating amendments is the purview of the legislature, not the judiciary.
You make an unfounded logical leap from "The view of the US Supreme Court is ..." to "If you wish there to be a Constitutional right to abortion ...".
The constitution does say: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
If we assume the sanctity of life, then it boils down to when does life begin? That is a judgement, not a "fact", but in practice it is often (but not always) a judgement that is dictated by religion. If we subtract the religiously motivated opinions of the supreme court justices, the SC decision to allow states to remove the right to abortion would not have passed.
>right to snort cocaine and screw dead horses
Sure. The federal government's job is to decide which cocoa derivatives should be a $Bn chain on every corner and which should be a prison sentence ? (results may vary with skin color).
Of all the things you are allowed to do to a horse, screwing it when dead is probably the least harmful to the horse
Being on the breeder cattle side of the divide, I keep coming back to this:
Why FFS do you need an app? Has the human species become so "lights on but nobody home", so "can't think if it isn't thumb scrollable on that thing that is grown to my hand" that they lost the ability to count days? Count back from 30? (I know, am pushing it, please forgive me, am on a rant here).
Let me give you a clue: start counting when find something weird in your knickers.
Spoken like a true man who knows nothing about the female reproductive system.
If you are trying to conceive, it is very useful to track the days of peak fertility, which can be done very roughly by counting the days since the last period, but as my wife will attest, there is a lot more to it than this, including "piss sticks" which measure hormone levels, and measuring base body temperature at the same time every day. Cycle length can vary quite a lot as well with some women, especially if there is a failed implantation, or "chemical pregnancy".
Spoken like a true man who knows nothing about the female reproductive system.
@AC: Sorry, but please read the comment again: I spoke about on the breeder cattle side of the divide.
So female here, although that seems to be the exception here. And no, I didn't throw a fit about being labelled like that, because I think we all know this is ElReg and we appreciate tongue in cheek.
But if you want to be condescending, please don't prove it by being a typical male by only listing (reading) marginally (oh dear, yes, that was a stereotypical remark too!)
And FYI, although I have so much "female experience" that I can tell you what happens after your hormonal levels drop indefinitely, I seem to have enjoyed an education which qualifies me to treat people like you when you come into my practice with a question mark on your face.
It might not go quite the way they expect.
A survey of male republicans asked the question "if there was an election today how would you vote?" gave surprising results, overall there was 8% swing to the Dems which is roughly inline with normal swings however men who are parents had a 28% swing to the Dems.
It seems they are not so happy about their daughters losing the right to determine their own sexual health.
If the same kind of swing is replicated across all the USA (unlikely but we can hope), the Republicans are dead in the water. So expect some backpedaling when it finally dawns on the GOP that crushing Roe vs Wade is not the humongous vote winner they thought it would be.
To be honest, I think the Republicans knew all along that three quarters of Americans support reproductive rights. It's not about vote winning for them because where they are going they don't need any votes.
I thought this was quite an interesting analysis about how the US is essentially moving towards being two countries but where the smaller country controls the larger country: America is Growing Apart, Possibly For Good
"If the same kind of swing is replicated across all the USA (unlikely but we can hope), the Republicans are dead in the water."
Maybe, maybe not. Polls aren't very good indicators of elections anymore, or we'd have had 4 (more) years of Billary instead of Papa Trump. Cheney didn't do too well in Wyoming the other day, so there is still a sizeable and clamorous contingent within the Republican party, and it's not hard to see most of those being the same ones that celebrated the SCOTUS decision the other month. My feeling is that "abortion" as a topic was less an issue among Republicans at large than among Democrats, because most of us dumb white guys who vote Republican just don't give a shit one way or the other. Abortion is/was a big issue among the bible-thumping Republicans, but, contrary to current popular belief, not all of us are bible-thumpers, maybe not even "most" of us anymore.
Mozilla is worried about privacy - full stop.
Reproductive health apps are a good counter to the "nothing to hide" brigade, because a few months ago, there was no fear-based reason to hide your reproductive health, now there is.
The guns reference was because the "pro-life" crowd who see nothing wrong with forced gestation would have an absolute fit over losing access to guns; and you have to draw those lines very clearly.
1. Delete all pregnancy/period track apps. In fact, delete all of those crappy apps your doctor wants you to install for appointments. Half the time they don't work, and you can do everything you need to on their website or over the phone.
2. Delete any other apps you don't really need or use much. You won't miss them.
3. Remove location services from every app except your GPS and/or map app if you use them. And lock those down too, only allowing location services when you are using the app.
4. Your weather app does not need location services, and if it has it, it is is probably selling your real time location (within a few meters) to anyone who wants it, plus all of the other creepy tracking. The National Weather Service is the source of all of this weather data and they have their own app with no location services, nor ads. Or you can just set a bookmark in your browser to weather.gov. I'm pretty sure the Met Office has one too.
5. Should you need reproductive services, do any searching with Duck-duck-go from a public terminal like in a library. For added protection (against both COVID and snooping cameras), wear a mask. Leave your phone at home.
6. When traveling out of state, leave your phone at home. If you need a phone, get a cheap burner one and pay for it with cash.
The vast majority of "Apps" are just a novelty to hoover up data from you. I believe that it's a really bad idea to keep any sensitive information on your phone at all. They are just way too easy to get stolen or go missing. Must you have account access to your retirement funds 24/7? Why should your complete health file be on your phone? A woman wanting to track her reproductive health could do just as well with a spreadsheet and I'm sure there are a few online for free or a nominal price that don't relay the data to anybody.
Mozilla's claim to be worried about privacy is somewhat undermined by the fact Firefox installs a Windows service to report home on your default browser (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defaultagent/default-browser-agent/index.html), plus the telemetry and other usage data Firefox collects by default.
Perhaps Mozilla believes 18 of 25 popular reproductive health apps didn't bribe Mozilla enough compared to the 7 that did?
Example: Despite the fact that Fitbit sends it's data to Google, Fitbit isn't marked as "*privacy not included". Isn't Google a major contributor to Mozilla?
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