“Your data is private. Period,” says period tracker Stardust on its website. As new research by Mozilla discovered, some users might find that claim to be a stretch.
According to Mozilla’s latest findings examining the privacy practices of period-tracking apps, Stardust was found to be sharing users’ sensitive health information with third-party analytics company RudderStack. This data included the user’s birthdate, birth control type, reproductive goals, and specific symptoms that the user was experiencing, and it tied that record to a unique identifier in place of the person’s name. (The FTC has long warned that this does not make the data anonymous or prevent it from being linked back to a person.)