Data Flows & Menstruation: How Users of Period Trackers Navigate the Datafication & Commodification of their Menstrual Cycles

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• Dr Stefanie Felsberger, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
• Tuesday 29 October 2024, 13:10-14:00
• Richard King room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Amelia Hassoun.

Tracking health indicators and vital signs has become increasingly popular and lucrative. The fastest growing sub-sector of the recent surge in self-tracking or fitness and health technology are fertility apps or period tracking apps. These applications are often regarded as and present themselves as medical tools to enhance women’s understanding of their bodies, but in fact barely any fertility app lives up to medical standards nor needs to undergo certification. The applications promise scientific and exact knowledge about people’s bodies and cycles through data collection. This method, developers claim, provides more precise insights than people could ever achieve trough self-observation. Yet, period trackers are an integral part of the growing market of self-tracking technology. Their business model is the same as most companies in the digital economy: to either sell data as commodity or to sell insights derived from analysis of this data for targeted advertising. My presentation explores how users of cycle trackers access information about their menstrual cycles and how they understand and navigate data commodification in their everyday lives. Through a data justice lens, I introduce questions of power inequalities to discourses on privacy, moving beyond a focus on individual rights and ownership of data to address material aspects of and injustices built into data infrastructures. I question what ways of knowing menstruation CTA data can provide users. I demonstrate that CTAs are designed for a cis-heterosexual user in monogamous relationships with a normative regular cycle and contribute a novel contextualisation of CTAs in the historical effort to make menstruation calculable and reproduction plan-able. I contribute insights into how the data-driven lens of menstruation and encoding of normal cycle definitions shape how participants track.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars
• Darwin College Research Talks
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• ESRC DTP
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Richard King room, Darwin College
• custom

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