Globally, women are being empowered by these modern goods and services, which range from breast pumps to fertility trackers. Still, the necessity to safeguard personal data is necessary as FemTech grows. In this article, we'll be sharing tips on how to safeguard your data.
Women all over the world now have means to monitor their physical changes thanks to the rise in popularity of FemTech in recent years. The invention of disposable towels in 1888 may have been the best thing, but is it really? Although privacy issues have surfaced in recent years, how concerned should you really be about the protection of your personal information?
Data safety concerns
Millions of women add personal details about themselves to period and health tracking apps every single day. With the help of these apps, one can easily monitor your physical changes in a less intrusive and time-consuming manner. Though this isn't always the case, most of us believe that our data will be secured by legislation such as the Patient Data Act in Sweden or HIPAA in the United States.
Data is primarily protected by data protection rules if it is owned by specific entities. An excellent illustration is that if you share medical information with your doctor, it will be protected by laws like HIPAA that safeguard health data protection. However, if you share the same information on a health tracking app, the protections do not apply. The product for the majority of apps is user data, which may be sold for a profit without the user knowing.
Apps that track your health can gather an incredible amount of personal data about you, including your location and contact details. The Journal of Medical Internet Research released the findings of a study. 23 well-known health tracking applications were used in the study. Only 70% of these applications had a privacy policy, and it was discovered that all of them were gathering sensitive health data from users. You don't have to remove your health-tracking applications, despite how unsettling this may sound. Now let's look into the following security practices to safeguard your data.
Limit any superfluous permissions
The majority of apps, including those for health, will ask for permission to access a range of data that is kept on your phone. This data may include photographs and/or location. Although most of us will automatically hand over access without a second thought, it is best for you to limit access to information on your phone that isn't necessary. All you have to do is navigate to Settings, select "Privacy and Security," and then check the apps that have access to your data.
Use encrypted text messaging
When you send a message or send data that is encrypted, it is essentially scrambled and cannot be decrypted without a key. Only the device you are messaging on and yours will have access to the key. By doing this, you can be sure that your information will remain confidential and unaltered before it reaches its designated party.
Additionally, you can investigate the security of your personal data by looking into your health-tracking app. For instance, no information is ever kept in one place—all of the data you submit to your Flo App is transferred over a secure cloud server.
Use official app stores
Installing apps from unidentified sources may put you in danger of having your data collected without your knowledge or consent, among other harmful activities. Although downloading free software from unidentified sources could appear easy at first, there could be a privacy risk involved.