Messages on Obstetrics, Pregnancy, and Sexual Sexuality: The Apple View of Fertility-Aware Apps and Methods for Women’s Health
The new Apple Watch had an interesting feature: the ability to tell whether someone had ovulated using their temperature from their wrist. Apple said that the feature could help people understand their bodies, or help people know the optimal time to try to get pregnant. It said that this information shouldn’t be used as birth control. Problem is, Apple says one thing and people do another.
Fertility tracking is a birth control method that has been used by some religions that do not allow birth control, and it has even been promoted by the Catholic church. But more people are exploring fertility-awareness methods as they push back against the pill as the default method of birth control. Hormonal birth control can have side effects that can be fatal. The idea of experiencing ovulation, which blocks hormonal birth control and has significant health benefits, is not held by many medical professionals.
That skepticism, and an overall lagging investment in women’s health care, has fueled a boom in femtech. But the mobile apps that lead this market, such as Natural Cycles and Daysy, serve a niche customer base and have their own costs. The daysy is a $320 meter that takes body temperature data and then uses it to predict when you’ll have sex. The annual subscription to Natural Cycles costs 99 and is an app that calculates likely fertility. The Apple Watch is being used to help women have an enjoyable menstrual cycle.
When Apple first launched Cycle Tracking for periods in its Health app, the feature was fairly basic. You couldn’t log factors like birth control or pregnancy because it didn’t do much. However, the company recently added advanced features that can help retroactively identify when a person ovulates and detect cycle deviations.
The Privacy of Biometrics in the Post-Roe Era: Why You Shouldn’t Touch, Touch, or Face ID
While these tools might be helpful, it’s understandable if you’re leery of sharing biometric information for this particular purpose in the post-Roe era. You can easily remove those features if that is the case.
When your phone is locked with a passcode, Touch ID, or Face ID, all of your health and fitness data in the Health app, other than your Medical ID, is encrypted. Health data is always stored on our server, and both transit and destination are secure. And if you have a recent version of watchOS and iOS with the default two-factor authentication and a passcode, your health and activity data will be stored in a way that Apple can’t read it.
No one covers what happens if you share the data with third-party apps. It is not guaranteed that Apple won’t share data with law enforcement. While period app data hasn’t been a major part of efforts to prosecute abortion seekers thus far, the only way to be 100 percent sure is to go non-digital.
If you’ve decided you’d rather just delete all your Cycle Tracking data altogether or learn more about period app privacy, you can refer to the related links box above.