Ladies are skeeved out at the notion that Uncle Google will know when Aunt Flo is in town.
Twitter users are posting their feelings of dread after the search engine giant announced that it will acquire the popular fitness tracking watch Fitbit — since the device also records when it’s their time of the month.
“Google isn’t trustworthy. I don’t want them to access my personal health,” wrote Twitter user @bluebird1059. “Tracking my period is creepy. Nope nope nope nope.”
The search engine giant’s parent company Alphabet unveiled plans to buy Fitbit — which boasts 28 million active users — for $2.1 billion on Friday in an effort to rival the Apple Watch in the fitness-tracking sphere.
But users are increasingly skeptical of Google’s data practices, despite Fitbit’s vow to “never sell” personal information and that “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads,” the smartwatch company said in a press release.
“FitBit tracks a woman’s period unless you manually opt out. This is scary to think what third parties could get their hands on this data and what they might do with it,” wrote Twitter user @FrmrLionTamer.
Another woman took her fears a step further and published a personal essay Monday that details how she was targeted for baby advertisements after her menstruation data — tracked in an app — was swiped.
“Out of nowhere, I was being targeted with sponsored posts for everything from pregnancy health vitamins, to baby clothing and children’s books,” Talia Shadwell wrote in the Daily Mirror. “It was bizarre because I have no children — and not that it’s anyone’s business — but I don’t plan on it anytime soon.”
Curious about why Facebook might be pegging her as pregnant, she started digging a little deeper. She opened her period tracking app — which she declined to name — and it showed her period as “late.”
“It was then I began to feel uneasy as my mind made the connection between my period tracking app believing I had missed a cycle ten days ago, and my Facebook account that was suddenly trying to sell me pregnancy paraphernalia within days of my period appearing to be ‘late,’ ” she wrote.
Shadwell pulled up the app’s privacy settings and noticed that the terms and conditions “cleverly avoided ruling out sharing information about aggregated data — like patterns or trends,” she wrote.
Shadwell initially posted her findings on Twitter before penning the article.
Been debating whether I should share this – but think it’s a revealing – and somewhat creepy – insight into how big tech navigates women’s bodies: Last week I suddenly began getting mummy and baby ads on Facebook…
Now, she’s urging others to be skeptical of companies that have access to your personal data.
“We must not be complacent about intrusive technology,” she wrote. “We are in an arms race to regulate before we lose control of our valuable personal data, and our privacy with it.”
Source: Nypost
