Users log everything from cravings to period flow, and apps provide predictions based on these inputs.
That argument, however, doesnt hold water.
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This is why advice urging people to delete their period tracking apps iswell-intentioned but off the mark.
Some apps connect to other apps like physical activity trackers.
Some apps ask for the users cycle length, which people may not know.
But what about the data in aggregate?
The simplest way to combine data from multiple users is to average them.
For example, the most popular period tracking app,Flo, has an estimated 230 million users.
The blue line represents a single user.
The orange line is the average of 230 million users.
The green line combines 230 million users submitting good data with 3.5 million users submitting junk data.
Note that there is little difference between the orange and green lines.
Junk data is just another bang out of noise.
This simple example illustrates three problems.
People who submit junk data are unlikely to affect predictions for any individual app user.
It would take an extraordinary amount of work to shift the underlying signal across the whole population.
And even if this occurred, poisoning the data risks making the app useless for those who need it.
Even users search histories can identifyhow far along they are in pregnancy.
What do we really need?
People have beenconcerned about digital data collectionin recent years.
