In a post-Roe world, now that abortion is illegal and restricted in most states, Americans have grown concerned about the privacy protections their favorite period and pregnancy apps provide. It appears that concern is warranted, as a report from Mozilla has found most popular cycle tracking apps don’t protect their users’ privacy at all.
Researchers at the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization best known for the Firefox browser which now works to promote an open internet, analyzed 25 reproductive health apps and wearables that could potentially collect sensitive data and share it with third parties, and that includes authorities who may use it to prosecute people who cross state lines to seek abortions. The report found that the majority of those apps — 18 of them — weren’t clear on what data they would share with law enforcement and when.
The apps that raised those red flags include Clue, Flo, Glow, and Maya Period, Fertility, Ovulation, & Pregnancy. To give you some context on their popularity, Clue was downloaded more than 10 million times from Google Play Store, while Flo was downloaded 50 million times; Glow was downloaded over 1 million times; and Maya was downloaded 5 million times.
“Best practices for privacy by design and by default have existed for a while, but most of the leading reproductive health apps chose to ignore them,” researcher Misha Rykov said in a statement. “This is scary when even the baseline security is shaky in apps used by millions of women post-Roe vs Wade.”
Clue receiving a warning label is shocking because, as a German company, it adheres to the European General Data Protection Regulation law, therefore it’s not subject to U.S. law. Despite assuring its users that it does not sell their data, Mozilla found that Clue’s privacy policy falls short of using a unique identifier and users’ birth dates to track them for advertising and personalization purposes.
Two of the period tracking apps that passed the privacy test are Euki and Natural Cycles. The coolest part about Euki is if you don’t want anyone to see your data upon request, you type “0000” and it’ll display a false screen. As far as wearables go, Mozilla found five of them safe to use, including the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, the Whoop Strap, and models from Fitbit and Garmin. Apple has an excellent track record of pushing back against data requests from law enforcement.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.