Meta Caught Snooping in Popular Period Tracker

The company’s out for blood. Kind of.

By Danielle Han | August 11, 2025 | 1:38pm

Photo: Getty Images Tech

Meta Caught Snooping in Popular Period Tracker

Facebook’s data empire just got creepier. On August 4, a jury in California ruled that Meta violated the state’s wiretap law by “intentionally eavesdrop[ing]” on Flo users’ private menstrual health data without their consent and using that data for targeted advertising.

Flo, a London-based app, is used by over 420 million people around the world to track periods, ovulation, and pregnancies. According to the trial brief, the data collected from an onboarding survey where new users are prompted to select a “goal indicating whether they are pregnant, want to be pregnant, or want to track their period” was compromised.

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Such apps have long elicited concerns around becoming a lucrative arm for sleazy capital enterprises. Menstrual cycle data, researchers at the University of Cambridge say, are a “gold-mine for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet, and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels, and contraception use.” And, after Roe was overturned in 2022, there has been growing unease that period-tracking data could also be used to identify—and incriminate—people seeking an abortion, especially in states where it’s banned. (That same year, Wired gave Flo a four-out-of-five ranking for its data privacy.) Thanks to the class-action suit, the fears have been proven right: according to last week’s verdict, Flo’s been helping to feed Meta’s “machine learning algorithms that power each of [Google and Meta’s] respective advertising networks.”

The ruling stems from a larger class-action lawsuit originally filed in 2021 against Flo, Meta, and Alphabet, as well as data analytics firms like Flurry. But while Google and Flo have since settled, Meta still denies any wrongdoing. “We vigorously disagree with this outcome and are exploring all legal options,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch on August 5. “The plaintiffs’ claims against Meta are simply false. User privacy is important to Meta, which is why we do not want health or any sensitive information, and why our terms prohibit developers from sending any.”

As Meta fires up for a likely appeal, the trial’s lead lawyers are, for now, celebrating a “historic data privacy victory.” In a shared statement, Michael Canty and Carol Villegas said the “verdict sends a clear message about the protection of digital health data and the responsibilities of Big Tech…Companies like Meta that covertly profit from users’ most intimate information must be held accountable.”

The statement explains that during the trial, five women shared “deeply personal stories and the intimate health data” they put into the app, “including details about their menstrual cycles, sexual activity, and pregnancies. Their voices represented not just their own accounts of being unknowingly violated, but the silent outrage of millions whose private lives were turned into data points without consent.”

Profiling customers to send them targeted ads has become an especially concerning trend when it comes to menstrual data. Infamously, Target has used predictive analytics to identify a pregnant woman before she had even told the rest of her family and friends. Apps that collect fitness goals can reportedly collect sensitive health information, without having HIPAA regulations to rein its information in. And the mining’s not just creepy—but dangerous. For people in states with abortion bans, many are worried that their period tracking data can be used against them.

All this is a disappointing pivot from Flo’s “promise” to keep safe its collected health information, as well as its supposed dedication to “protect user privacy.” Just three years ago, we celebrated the app as the first femtech one to launch an anonymous setting, assuming it was grabbing the mantle to provide safety in a post-Roe age of Big Tech surveillance. But as we’re cruelly reminded, again and again, safety has little place in a growing technocracy.

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