The team behind menstrual health and period tracking app Clue has said it will not disclose users’ data to American authorities, following Donald Trump’s reelection.
The message comes in response to concerns that during Trump’s second presidency, abortion bans that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 will worsen and states will attempt to increase menstrual surveillance in order to further restrict access to terminations.
FOSS Period Tracking Apps Exist: (there may be others, as well)
https://fossdroid.com/a/bluemoon.html
https://fossdroid.com/a/mensinator.html
https://github.com/TotallyMonica/foss-period-tracker
Also paper and pencil.
Also the oldest known “writing” is a stick with 28 notches on it.
How does an app being FOSS defend them from warrants?
Edit. Thank you guys for the details. I learneded something new today, much appreciated.
Simple. Most FOSS are built for privacy and thus do not harvest data to send to some server somewhere in the world for whatever obscure reason. The data is locally stored on your device and stays and dies there.
No callback, no selling nor surrending data.
Personally speaking, I’d quicker have all data banks destroyed than surrendered to whatever purposes, if I ever decided to build an aplication that somehow compiled data.
FOSS implies it’s your hardware, therefore a subpoena would extract no information because there is no information outside of the users device.
Something being FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe / ethical, but a LOT of FOSS apps are designed with those principles in mind.
However, being FOSS means that if an app claims that it is safe / ethical (ex. In this case, not storing data anywhere but on your device), you or an experienced peer can check the code to verify that fact.
It doesn’t, but with these apps, you can see what information they send back to their servers (if any). If there is no info getting sent back to any servers, then there’s nothing a subpoena can do since there’s no info to subpoena. You can’t obtain info that just isn’t there.
