Building a Better Period-Tracking App
Prognosis: Misconception
Bloomberg
4.1 • 838 Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Prognosis, we'll meet the Bloody Health collective – a group of feminist coders in Berlin who are looking for a safer way to track their periods. Targeted advertising, third-party data sharing and tracking make most menstruation apps just as problematic as they are popular, privacy activists argue. For the women of Bloody Health, the sure way to keep control is to build their own open-source app.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. |
| 0:04.8 | So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. |
| 0:11.5 | Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. |
| 0:16.1 | You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. |
| 0:19.1 | A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. |
| 0:23.3 | Follow the Big Take podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. |
| 0:29.7 | I think it's a problem that we have become used to having free digital services |
| 0:35.7 | and free inc quotation markets because because of course we're then really |
| 0:38.9 | paying with our private data. |
| 0:43.6 | These days, there seems to be a smartphone app for just about everything. |
| 0:48.3 | One of the more popular categories are apps that track menstrual cycles. |
| 0:52.9 | More than 100 million women around the world already use them. |
| 0:56.9 | Some are trying to get pregnant. |
| 0:58.8 | Others are trying to avoid getting pregnant. |
| 1:01.7 | And many just want a better handle on what their bodies are doing. |
| 1:06.3 | But these free apps have trade-offs. |
| 1:10.0 | Some use sensitive health information to place targeted ads. |
| 1:14.0 | The apps all need to make money. |
| 1:16.8 | And that might mean in a big picture sense, their main product is actually their user's data. |
| 1:24.1 | Welcome to Prognosis, Bloomberg's podcast about the intersection of health and technology |
| 1:29.1 | and the unexpected places that is taking us. |
| 1:32.8 | I'm your host, Michelle Fay-Cortez. |
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