Femtech: The Rise of Period Tracking Apps

Desi Lydic chats with Dr. Lynae Brayboy and Clue app co-founder Ida Tin about the menstrual health benefits and privacy risks posed by the rapidly growing femtech app industry.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Comedy Central. Wow. The hottest apps are
all about fem tech, which is a combination of female
and um tech. And this technology for females is a
rapidly growing industry that, like sand after a day at
the beach, has found its way into every part of
women's bodies, tracking all of our needs from pregnancy, nursing periods,

(00:24):
even tracking Keegel exercises. You thought your peloton instructor was tough,
you have not met my gegle coach. But how necessary
are these apps and will they replace our doctors? My
name is Line brave Boy. I am an obstetrician, gynecologist
and a reproductive in a chronologist with a specialty and infertility,
and I'm also an egg biologist and I also do

(00:45):
clinical research on them tech. I am Dassielidic, and I
too am a woman, but much less accomplished. So your doctor, clearly,
why are women going to these apps? Why not just
go to someone like you? Well, there are a lot

(01:05):
of great apps that are high quality, and what people
don't realize is that a lot of physicians will take
what's called it history. What's been happening with you? What
changes have you had, and a lot of people can't
answer it because they haven't really thought about what's happening
in their cycles or with their periods. So if you're
keeping track of your own history, then you can get
the treatment that you need for the concerns that you have.

(01:27):
She's right. Without the reminder of an app, women are
often too busy making up for the female recession to
track their cycles. I mean, what am I going to do?
Write it in a diary, hide it under a pillow,
and my husband finds it and reads it, publishes it
that I'm a multi millionaire author of a period journal.
I can't do that the tour dates alone. Yeah. So
period tracking is really a wonderful tool because what it

(01:50):
does is it allows an individual to track what's happening
in their own health and when they actually do meet
with their physicians, they're able to advocate for themselves. And
it's empowering as people may feel that they're the only
ones suffering from health conditions and that's not the case. Yeah,
women do feel isolated and need to share more. This
does need to be normalized, and so when you're tracking

(02:11):
your own menstrual cycle, you can say, hey, I don't
think This is right, but you should be careful about
apps that are free and don't tell you what they
do with their data. What do you mean, Well, there
have been some apps that, unfortunately, have violated the trust
of their users by selling data. Oh man, can you

(02:33):
imagine if someone put in that they have like two vaginas.
That'd be embarrassing. You should be very wary of apps
that don't disclose what they do with your data, and
that's unfortunate. Are you kidding me? More than nineteen million
women in the US have downloaded the flow app, which

(02:54):
tracks menstrual cycles and pregnancies, all of it personal information,
but millions of women are now discus of wink was
also shared with other companies selling our opulation data. These
apps are snitching on our snatches. Who would do something
like this? I decided to confront the woman person who
gave them tech its lady name and created one of

(03:14):
these suspicious chick apps. My name is I am the
co founder of an appicle Clue, and we help people
with cycles and women understand their minstrel health and their bodies. ETA.
I have to be honest with you. I feel really violated.
I mean, I shared some of my deepest, darkest secrets
with these apps, my dense breasts, my unfriendly cervical environment.

(03:36):
All the times I fantasize about the property brothers, how
do I know that I'm ever going to be able
to trust again? We have never sold your data and
we will never sell your data. Look, Ata, I want
to trust you, but this is not just a normal pact.
We're talking periods here. This is a blood pact. I know.
Let me take it really seriously. Okay, Well, how concerned

(03:56):
should we be about this data leak? Is it like
a day one league or a full blown day three?
Tie a sweatshirt around your waist and pray for the
best kind of weak. We should be pretty worried because
these are companies that deliberately have chosen to share more
data than they had told their uses that they would share.
And that's not right. So how can we safely use

(04:17):
these apps moving forward? Well it's hard. Honestly. In Europe
we had really tough regulation and we've been checked, whereas
in the US you are not being checked. So one
good navigation is to see how does this company make money?
And if you can't see how they make money, that's
a red flag. So If it's free, that's a red flag.
If you don't pay for the product you're using, you

(04:41):
most likely are the product yourself. So clearly, fan tech
is a lot like our bodies. We have to stay
vigilant to make sure everything is functioning properly. So until
they invent sent tech tech to monitor these apps, I
guess we'll just have to track them ourselves. The Daily
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(05:01):
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