So I just installed this right now after seeing this, and man this app has a lengthy initial startup process with dark patterns and everything. Now apparently I'm ovulating in two days. 🤭

it's quite silly imo. unlikely to accomplish much or anything at all. teaching people about free software like drip is way more likely to actually help people. it's free, open source, and completely local.

edit: they even have a mastodon!

So I fucking hate that this is where my brain went, but my kneejerk reaction to this was: "If I do this, could it be used as evidence to charge my wife with the death of a nonexistent fetus?"

I live in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south where women are incubators and a long list of stereotypes. I could definitely see it argued in court - successfully - that an app like that was only used on my phone to try to conceal my wife's data, and the data points to one of the ways we've criminalized pregnancy.

...and that's thinking about what could happen here and now. Once Trump has had his way with our country, we'd probably just get deported to one of daddy Putin's gulags or some shit.

I really fucking hate it here.

I'm doing my part!

Post text:

Dear men I need you to go download an app called "Flo" and start using it chaotically. Don't ask anyone how to use it. Just use it. The more, the better. Let's Christmas tree that data.

As a software developer who loves to screw the data and a person who will do ANYTHING can to protect women for the next 4 years, I am so excited to begin tracking my manstrual cycle

What's the point of spamming one specific menstrual tracker / women's health app? Lack of better hobbies? Or is there some controversy around the company behind it? Or just general state of freedom and surveillance in the USA?

people will do anything but search for an alternative

You would think it wouldn’t be this easy, but given the incredible disconnect from reality on reporting late term abortion statistics, this could scramble data.

For those who don’t know, the raw statistic of late term abortions comes down to late term terminations via a procedure used in pre 20week months to end a pregnancy. There’s little difference in logging the data. Babies can die inside, even as you’re trying to attend your own baby shower, like with that young girl who recently tried to get help from 3 Texas emergency rooms, but instead died due to the late term corpse rotting in her uterus.

The procedure used to expel a stillbirth in the late term is an abortion. That is what pregnancy termination by procedure is: abortion. But the context of corpse removal is lost on political alarmists who don’t bother to do their own research on how/when the procedure is used in late term pregnancy, in favor of uneducated hysteria and the demonizing of women.

My point is, given how resolutely people have not delved into the context of this data regarding stillbirths, messing with menstrual trackers can and probably will work, provided you don’t limit yourself to Flo.

I have several old Android phones sitting in a drawer. They've just been given a glorious purpose.

This is the scummiest app I've ever downloaded.

I have a reminder app that randomizes reminders for a medical issue I'm dealing with.

Sounds like I'll be dealing with two medical issues that app will require now.

There was an IT Crowd episode on the Manstrual Cycle

I don’t want to victim blame but if using an app is optional and it could get you in trouble with the law (regardless of how bad the law is), you should not use it.

Having said that, as a dev, please pollute data as much as possible.

Management needs to learn how valuable good data is and good data comes with proper consent (most people wouldn’t share their data if they could opt out).

Uh, it was trying to make me pay?

Was totally on board till I hit the pay wall.

Take all that neatly organized data and turn it into Christmas tree lights that have been sitting in a box all summer.

I am gonna get it.

What is the actual goal here and will this behavior achieve that goal? Are we...

Adding a bunch of bullshit fictional data into a database that contains and will continue to gather legitimate data.

It strikes me that this would make the entire dataset less useful for legitimate medical research while not really doing much against targeted attacks. I could see some women's health researchers using anonymized data from something like this, and noise from people vomiting into it in protest would destroy it for that use. Or, you'd notice a bunch of accounts all join at about the same time making nonsensical data and just ignore the data from the accounts that joined around that time. Meanwhile I doubt this will stop the Gestation Gestapo from correlating genuine data with the actual identity of its owner.

Are you going to try to input obviously fake data? Make an attempt at realistic data? Try to trigger a Gestation Gestapo death squad, trying to make the service useless via false positives?

Or run up the service's data bills and maybe take up some of their cloud storage with fake data?

Start adding bullshit fictional data coinciding with women genuinely leaving the service

What would this accomplish that just having women stop using the thing do?

I've been trying to make that point for over a decade now. I think I get to unironically drop this xkcd. The alt text mentions diaspora, lol.

Done. If only I could script it...