There are downsides with downloading their app just to input bad data, but it’s a fun thought.
edit: While we’re at it we might as well offer an alternative app to people.
I posted in !opensource@programming.dev to collect recommendations for better apps
The post: https://lemmy.ca/post/32877620
Leading Recommendation from the comments
The leading recommendation seems to be Drip (bloodyhealth.gitlab.io)
Summarizing what people shared:
- accessible: it is on F-droid, Google Play, & iOS App Store
- does not allow any third-party tracking
- the project got support from “PrototypeFund & Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Superrr Lab and Mozilla”
- Listed features:
- “Your data, your choice: Everything you enter stays on your device”
- “Not another cute, pink app: drip is designed with gender inclusivity in mind.”
- “Your body is not a black box: drip is transparent in its calculations and encourages you to think for yourself.”
- “Track what you like: Just your period, or detect your fertility using the symptothermal method.”
Their Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dripapp
Legit only comment so far to not just say “PAPER EXISTS1!1!1!1!” So props for that.
Can I ask how polluting the data will help? Most apps that don’t care about privacy can probably identify people with zero issues. I bet people are giving these apps location data etc.
I don’t know what you mean by good data comes with proper consent. Like, ideally all data was offered with proper consent, but how does that make data better or worse? If anything, data given without consent is likely to be more wholistic/unedited since they were not given time to redact/remove info. If someone stole my phone and took all my data, they would have “better data” than had I been informed this would happen and given time to wipe my phone.
It makes data less reliable.
How do we know if a certain profile is genuine vs someone dicking around. Or mostly genuine and the person didn’t do some malicious compliance for certain parts of the app they don’t care about.
If it becomes a social trend and someone gets caught, it would be easier to say they lied cause they wanted to do a tick tock challenge.
When someone wants to help the data collectors then they would do more proper hygiene to their profile, keep things up to date and give honest feedback. Whereas someone like me never gives consent for data without being forced, so I always try to give as little and lie as much as I can.
I guess the assumption I made was that practically everyone knows apps and websites track them in some shape or form (even the least tech savvy person knows websites get total amount of visits), so “acting like no one is tracking you” isn’t ever true to begin with. Especially given this context for a period tracking app.