The UK’s billion-pound online advertising industry is “thwarting” women’s reproductive rights, Mozilla’s senior tech policy fellow Lucy Purdon has said, calling for better regulation.
Purdon has published a report presenting a gendered analysis of how women’s reproductive “milestones” — menstruation, conception, and menopause — are “capitalised on” for microtargeting purposes.
In the study, the researcher has argued that women’s data “powers lucrative digital ad businesses that incentivise opaqueness while enforcing false stereotypes associated with childbearing”.
She has suggested that pairing certain women’s age with a desire to bear children or the assumption that many women are able to carry pregnancies to term, for example, could further reinforce shame and stigma surrounding miscarriage and other complications.
“The online advertising ecosystem denies women full sovereignty over their health data and by design, puts women in a perpetual state of vulnerability over their safety,” she explained.
“There’s a reckoning over the importance of femtech in closing the divide on access to health information but this should not come with a risk of unwarranted surveillance. My research advocates for a stronger gender perspective in digital advertising reforms and regulating privacy.”
She added: “We need to put a stop to exploitative business models which continue to monetise women’s health data and demand action from policymakers and industry to develop innovative digital advertising alternatives.”
Purdon’s report, which looked at 1,000 women and femtech users across the UK, revealed that 82 per cent were unclear about how reproductive apps were safeguarding their data, while over 60 per cent showed great distrust over these apps’ ability to safeguard their privacy.
About 44 per cent of respondents had deleted an app due to privacy concerns and at least 20 per cent of those respondents had deleted a menstruation or fertility app, the study also showed.
After surveying 48 femtech industry players across the UK, EU and US, Purdon found that over 70 per cent had used some form of online advertising to generate their revenue, with at least 50 per cent admitting they used ad tech tools for retargeting such as Meta pixel or software development kits (SDKs) which collect lots of personal data.
A 2023 investigation by the Guardian in the UK revealed the NHS, the Metropolitan Police and several mental health charities were sharing sensitive data in this way. As of yet there has been no regulatory action, unlike in the US where femtech companies Flo and Premom faced action for sharing sensitive data with marketing and analytics firms in this way.
Purdon believes the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU has been significant in reducing the number of data breaches. However, she says Ad Tech and ad brokers are getting more complex at evading detection.
The researcher has recommended widening regulatory policies to include investigations into the role of pixels and SDKs particularly in the UK.
She has also called for data containing medical records to be categorised as “medical” in app stores, and not “health and fitness”, conducting more gender-focused research in data and privacy, and having an open register of data brokers and ad tech companies to make non-compliance easier to catch.
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