alt Hacker News> It seems like we can’t just necessarily leave it up to companies – or their ragtag teams of crackpot lawyers rewriting privacy policies every few months – to keep our private data private.
It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to. Not everything needs to be an app. All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
Replies
A paper diary doesn't predict your periods or ovulation. Quite the arrogance to describe this as niche and unneccessary when tens of millions of women think otherwise. And it's all their fault, of course.
Even if it was a requirement, doctors do not generally have legal authority to compel action. Hell, the average doctor would probably agree that the average patient hardly ever does what they’re told…
privacy legislation would just solve the problem by itself though.
> All the money spent on regulations and regulators to cover increasingly niche opt-in services that are entirely unnecessary is a waste.
That isn't what's happening. The regulations don't get little niche cases added to them, they're writen to be generally applicable to all niches.
> It's not a medical requirement from a doctor, so just keep a diary if you want to.
"Just don't use the computer if you don't want companies to rat you out to the fascist government that'll imprison or kill you for having a miscarriage" is a ridiculous victim-blaming position.
It's the practical reality of a fascist government that they won't enact privacy laws. And yes, women really shouldn't be using period tracking apps in the US, or made by the US. But that doesn't mean privacy laws are some "silly waste of my tax money".
It's not a "medical requirement" except for the many many many cases where it is. Similarly, this position extends to literally everything. Nothing "needs to be an app". But unless we want to pack up and discard the entire software industry, it really ought to be better about privacy like this.
Why is it a waste? If you want to provide an app, one should follow the law and the regulations. It isn't the wild west (and even that had regulations).
Also: Why blame the victims, not the perp?
Forest for the trees, dude.
I've never used Flo specifically, so I don't know what kind of data analysis it has available, but period data is the #1 most useful health data to have an app crunch for you, and "your period starts tomorrow" is a pretty darn useful notification to get.