How period trackers have changed girl culture | Hacker News Reader

How period trackers have changed girl culture

well.blogs.nytimes.com

72 pointsmatco1197 comments

As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value.

Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much value is in such information.

Perhaps there are other aspects I am overlooking?

> Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much value is in such information.

If someone stops having periods, that might be a sign they're pregnant. That's valuable to retailers (famously, some can spot when you're pregnant before even you know, by tracking purchases).

Also, mood swings and specific cravings might happen, and that would affect consumption? (Don't have personal experience here.)

Absolutely, we're talking about a really lucrative segment here...

> To marketers, the average Joe’s online data is worth around 10 cents. However, a pregnant woman’s data is worth fifteen times that: $1.50.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/one_womans_attempt_to_hide_h...

"pregnant woman’s data is worth fifteen times"

The reason for this is obvious if you've ever budgeted for a new baby in the house.

It's not just the cost of buying baby stuff. It's that people's lives fall into regular patterns. Usually, there are few opportunities to change someone's pattern. Pregnancy is one of the biggest such opportunities. For example, say someone goes to QFC for their weekly groceries - it's hard to convince them to go in the opposite direction to Safeway, even if it's about the same distance. Pregnancy is one of those few times when people's shopping patterns are up for grabs. If you can slip in and get them to go to Target for a few critical baby-things, maybe you can get them going to Target for everything else for the next ten years.

That makes sense. Why is it that this is creepier to me than the usual data tracking stuff?

I think they just show normal network ads.

As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value.

There are good reasons why people might want to make this sort of app beyond selling the data. There's a huge potential for health care service providers - if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor, and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast saving in the cost of supplying services.

if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor, and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast saving in the cost of supplying services.

This exactly. The app. I use is called the Pink Pad and free. I have been using it since 2011. Since then, I have stop taking the pill. There are no ads just very straight forward. It tells you fertile days and other things. Since that time, it has been off on certain days as that is my fault for not getting to properly note things. But it has been very spot on.

Relying on that app may not be the best idea; from the article:

>While the apps also can be used to track ovulation, signaling the days the user is more or less likely to become pregnant, most period tracker apps explicitly warn users not to rely on them to prevent pregnancy. The ovulation tracker and fertility prediction can be helpful for a woman trying to conceive, but it can give a false sense of security to a woman who relies on the app as a form of birth control.

>That’s because even the most vigilant ovulation tracking methods have shockingly high failure rates, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, with up to one in four women becoming pregnant over the course of a year with typical use.

>“Apps are a tool; they’re not actually a birth control method,” said Hannah Ransom of San Diego, a certified fertility awareness educator.

The maker of one of such app mentioned, Clue, is a Berlin based startup: https://www.helloclue.com/company.html

I guess that 4 people do not work for free. I understand that There's a huge potential for health care service providers, but how could this company get money out of this? This app is free for everyone. I do not connect the dots why one health care service provider should fund it. So perhaps you could elaborate it from this point of view?

In the case of Clue it looks like they are selling data insights, although it looks more like they're interested in overall trends rather than individuals (caveat: based on their marketing). They're already quite big at 22 staff (the 4 you saw on the site are the founders), and they're still hiring. That's all paid for with VC cash at the moment. I don't imagine they can easily cover that level of burn without targeting enterprise customers once the inventment runs out, which likely will be things like white label apps sold directly to health care providers - in European countries there's often one major provider that's run by the government. Selling a white-labelled app to them that can save the provider a large sum of money wouldn't be that hard.

Yes, but this one insurance instance is run by the state or directly controlled by the state.

Are women really so naive that they would provide such information to the state?

I looked at their (Clue's) privacy policy a while ago: basically you have the option of not creating an account, and they claim that everything is stored locally and not sent anywhere in that case.

I think it's a German/EU company, so they should have some restrictions on what they do with this data.

Maybe someone can take a closer look...

I can't say for the privacy policy, but I used Clue for over a year without an account. Since I forgot to do a final export of the data before resetting my phone (I know, I know...), I subsequently lost all the locally stored data for the past few months. When I contacted Clue, they said their was no way to retrieve it. So my guess is that they are telling the truth re: nothing sent to the cloud unless you explicitly choose to.

It's a safety tool. Imagine the app posting to Facebook in order to warn people of their interactions during this serious time.

Do you, uh, know anything about women.

I think there's a touch of "my adversary is a super-villain" paranoia to the anti-tracking sentiments. I mean Facebook or Amazon get talked about occasionally for being able to predict pregnancies or breakups an monetizing that. But, IMO, it's much overblown. Predctive analytics are not at that point, if they ever will be. The vast majority of ad targeting is a lot simpler than that. It's either common sense understandable (advertise nanny services to people who read parenting magazines) or trial and error. Trial and error is still the more powerful of the two.

FB & Google have the option to scan your site, pick audiences and advertising strategies and run everything on autopilot. it doesn't work very well.

If your strategy is to collect toilet break statistics, user listening habits or some other bit of "data" for a large number of free users than monetize it somehow, good luck.

I never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that half of all people have.

In American culture is pretty taboo to have a conversation about defecation - that's a process that all people have! It might not make sense, but it isn't unusual.

I agree completely. Personally, I don't recall ever witnessing this stigma, apart from the general disinterest in this topic.

Having said that, I don't understand the current movement of glorifying and promoting menstruation (e.g. [1], [2]). Sure, it's natural, but it's also rather yucky - just like shitting and pissing. But I'd still appreciate if I don't see photos of shit, menstruation, or sperm on my Facebook.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/menstrua...

[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/a-woman-ran-a-maratho...

I am from Brazil, I had never heard of a taboo in the open, but after I started to have long term girlfriends, all of them tried to not use the word "menses" in Portuguese, from methods that I think are stupid (writing only "m" instead) to the outright infuriating (using ambiguous and hard to understand euphemisms), it annoyed me a lot, and I argued with all of them about it, never worked, they never explained that behavior and continued it.

Isn't that about the same as people saying "I'm going to the toilet for number 2" instead of "I'm going to the toilet to shit"?

It's more like saying "I'm going to the back" in the amount of ambiguity in the phrase. Saying "number two" is clear in its meaning.

Yeah, in Greece they also say "I'm indisposed", and it's a generally-known euphemism for "I'm on my period", but you never really know if they're on their period or if they're ill.

> Personally, I don't recall ever witnessing this stigma

I've seen it in things like my mom asking me whether I'd be uncomfortable getting her pads from the supermarket, which was pretty puzzling to me. I guess it's to women what buying condoms is to men, maybe.

It's not unlike the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that almost all of people have, which is defecation. Operationally speaking, the two are very similar. So, why is there a stigma behind defecation?

Why is there a stronger stigma behind menstruation, though?

In many societies, people who had recently menstruated were seen as "unclean", yet defecation did not have the same stigma.

I think that's not entirely correct. In those same societies, the left hand is considered "unclean" because of its association with wiping.

What societies are those?

http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html

For instance.

Not having any experience with orthodox Judaism, it's hard to put those passages into context.

It's rather hard to decide what to make of that page. It seems to have an agenda, though I'm not sure I understand what it is.

Jewish society in biblical times comes to mind. I'm sure it's not unique.

I don’t know about operational speaking, but epedemiologically speaking, the two are very different.

One of them is associated with e. coli, a lethal bacterium that even in modern times and developed nations kills people on a regular basis, e.g. Walkerton, Ontario, where seven people were killed by improperly treated drinking water in 2000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak

It’s easy to see why humans have developed behaviours and social stigma around defecation.

Menstruation is very different. Our social behaviours around it may have more to do with our social behaviours around genders, sexual availability, and other stuff. I’m not an anthropologist, so I’ll just stop here before I dig a hole for myself.

I’ll just note that the two are very unlike in very important ways.

Not very unlike. They are mostly alike. They have differences, which is why we only say they are alike, not equivalent.

They are only “mostly alike” if you carefully cherry-pick the ways in which you count similarity, while handwaving over the number and importance of the ways in which they are different.

Humans care about deciding which things are actually alike and which things are only superficially alike, because such choices have important consequences.

For example, if we decided they are “mostly alike,’ we might decide that all you need is a pad to absorb defecation, and you need only change it when it cannot absorb any more liquid.

After many such discoveries, we change our minds and say, “Although they may appear to be alike at first glance, it turns out that they are mostly different."

>They are only “mostly alike” if you carefully cherry-pick the ways in which you count similarity, while handwaving over the number and importance of the ways in which they are different.

They are very alike if you look at all the other bodily activities and then rank them based on how different they are.

Is 1mm a short distance or a huge distance? Without knowing the scale, you can't say if a 1mm difference is important or rounding error. 10000mm and 10001mm is not a big difference. .001mm and 1.001mm is a big difference. But both are only the difference of 1mm.

In the same way, these bodily functions are different, but their differences are not great compared to the differences between these and other bodily functions. Urination is one of the only things I can think is closer... and it also has a lot of stigma around it.

I'm not a native speaker, so forgive me for not expressing myself clearly enough, but isn't urination also considered to be defecation, or does defecation in English refers only to the "number two"? I'm asking, because urine is mostly sterile.

However, my point was that while there are a lot of obvious differences, defecation is similar enough to menstruation, such that it's not surprising that stigma is also similar.

I’m only familiar with the word “defecation” being used to denote expelling of faeces:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecation

At least medically speaking, yes, the term "defecation" is used exclusively to refer to "number two":

> Defecation is the final act of digestion, by which organisms eliminate solid, semisolid, and/or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecation

I'd argue urination is less stigmatized than defacation('number two') or menstruation. How many times have you seen someone urinating in (semi-)public vs. defacating in public?

Almost all people? I am sure you mean all people.

The stigma is almost certainly connected to misogyny. By stigmatising the bodily functions of most women, you stigmatise them.

I understand what you're trying to say about patriarchy, and it's a problem, but that said...

I and 100% of people have a few completely natural and necessary processes that we go through on a pretty much daily basis that are so stigmatized they have a special room in our houses dedicated to making sure we can do them in private. I'm talking about defecating and urinating.

Can you imagine if--once a month, like clockwork--you got really bad IBS and couldn't help but visibly leak diarrhea into your pants? Would you celebrate "I have monthly track marks", or would you develop coping mechanisms to try to hide it?

And before anyone complains about "you can't compare pooping and having a period", uh, poo is brown because it's mostly dead red blood cells. It is a process for expelling material my body can no longer use. About as comparable as apples and oranges, which is to say, fairly comparable, because they're both sweet, round fruits that grow on trees and contain their own seeds.

We generally don't share the details of what we do with our bodily fluids with other people. I mean, we call public toilets "restrooms" because we can't bring ourselves to admit to what is going on in there.

Should our culture be so prudish about bodily functions? I don't know, but that is certainly the case as of right now. And it's applied pretty evenly, regardless of sex. So I would say it's easily "understandable".

[0] I usually leave sweating and fatigued, so I don't know how much "rest" I'm receiving in there. Suppose I need to lay off the Chipotle. Which brings up another point, severe abdominal cramping isn't unique to menstruation, either.

The colouring of faeces is due to the breakdown of heme, but faeces should not contain any nontrivial quantity of intact dead red blood cells.

> I understand what you're trying to say about patriarchy

I wasn't trying to say anything about patriarchy, just to be clear.

> Would you celebrate "I have monthly track marks", or would you develop coping mechanisms to try to hide it?

Neither, probably. If everyone got it, I'd say "I have my IBS these days" and everyone would understand.

> We generally don't share the details of what we do with our bodily fluids with other people.

Sure, but there's a difference between "holy shit this period is so goopy, it's like I have a second nose" and "this period is giving me pretty bad cramps".

> So I would say it's easily "understandable".

My issue is not about describing periods in detail, I understand why people don't want to invoke images in other people's heads. I'm just puzzled about not even being able to say "I have my period this week", which is like saying "I have diarrhoea", it's not really that descriptive unless the recipient tries hard to imagine it, in which case, it's their problem :P

It has all the unreasonable stigmas of bodily functions and some of the unreasonable stigmas around sex and the much of the unreasonable stigma around puberty.

It's at least partially due to the process being "unnatural" in a historical context. Women were historically pregnant much of their lives, so having a period would have been relatively uncommon. It's also been explicitly stigmatized in many different religious contexts, from the Old Testament to Native American cultures.

Is any of this right? Probably not. But for better or worse, we're driven as much by our history as our intellect.

It must be fascinating to work on an app where the target demographic is slightly less than half of the world's population. The CEO's Twitter feed is very interesting too.

https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968

What may seem as a simple tracker app on the surface is actually a very complicated product tackling many problems all over the world.

To someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s like me, this seems like a strange regression in some ways. The overwhelming majority of girls were on the pill pretty much when they became sexually active, and when I look at my age group right now, that's still the case to this day. The pill was considered normal, safe, and liberating. Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

Just two decades ago, period trackers would not have been all that useful to most people. That's a big culture shift.

You think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a drug to cope with a normal healthy body function?

I think it's good if more women are able to cope without the drugs.

I said it's a culture shift, I didn't mean to pass any judgement.

As someone with a male body I'm not really in the position to tell. I have a strong feeling of what I would do if I had been born female, but I was not, so...

Pain, suffering, and health problems in general, are indeed natural as you say. However, most people would consider them part of the "no thanks" aspect of nature. You disagree, and I suspect you already know that's an extreme and unethical position to hold, otherwise you would not have made a new HN account just for this discussion.

> I said it's a culture shift, I didn't mean to pass any judgement.

You said it was a 'regression'.

Yes, my personal opinion seeped through a little bit here. If that offended you, so be it.

I never said it offended me - I was just pointing out that you weren't being as non-judgemental as you claimed you were.

It's like a fight between SJW's. Who's the least judgemental! Tune in at 11 and find out!

lol

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

I feel as if you've decided to follow me around and find a reason to go through with your previous threat.

What exactly have I done to warrant this harassment?

The comments I've replied to are ones I ran across randomly browsing the threads, or that users flagged.

The issue is that your comments are problematic, and you need to fix that if you want to continue commenting here. The same applies to everyone.

So our disagreement boils down to language "gotchas"? Yes, you got me. Although one might argue that labeling something a regression is not a value judgement when things have indeed gone back to how they were in the past - but if bias is what you were looking for you found it. I never tried to hide it either.

Let's talk about something worthwhile instead: do you really believe, as alluded to in your comments, that the natural state is an ideal humans should aspire to, especially in the face of disease and other bodily limitations?

"like a strange regression in some ways" != "it was a regression"

> You think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a drug to cope with a normal healthy body function?

That's what I've always thought was so odd about the complaint that erectile dysfunction are typically covered by health insurance but contraception may not be: the former fixes a broken body, while the other breaks a functioning one.

"Fixed" and "broken" are defined how the person wants to use his body, not by natural order of things. Otherwise, reaching immortality could be viewed as "breaking" perfectly functioning death meachanism.

> "Fixed" and "broken" are defined how the person wants to use his body, not by natural order of things.

That's an interesting idea, but one which I have to disagree with. A person who wishes to be an amputee does not have a broken body because he has two arms and two legs, nor is his body fixed by severing one or more of them; rather, he has healthy limbs and a broken brain or mind, which may be fixable with particular forms of therapy, or not, but certainly not by destroying his healthy limbs.

> Otherwise, reaching immortality could be viewed as "breaking" perfectly functioning death mechanism.

From what I know of how people age and die it appears that death is the failure and that immortality, were it achievable, is the proper state.

Interesting discussion. What's the definition of "fixed" and "broken" you're implicitly using in your argument?

stop worrying about definitions, it's a question of intent and life satisfaction for people.

What category someone on the internet wants to file that under is irrelevant.

I don't really care about practical implications of such discussion. On the contrary, these definitions seem to be an interesting philosophical topic.

> What's the definition of "fixed" and "broken" you're implicitly using in your argument?

Functionally according to its function. One's digestive organs are meant to digest; one's reproductive organs are meant to reproduce. Reproductive organs which can't reproduce are broken: fixing ones which are broken is indeed healthcare, while breaking ones which are fully-functioning is an elective procedure.

But "function" only exists for something that was created by intellectual being with a goal in mind. How can you define "function" for something that evolved naturally?

> But "function" only exists for something that was created by intellectual being with a goal in mind.

That doesn't bother me, since I think it's pretty obvious that there must be a prime mover of some sort.

> How can you define "function" for something that evolved naturally?

What it does. A kidney filters blood (and performs some other functions as well): a kidney which doesn't filter blood is obviously unhealthy. A heart pumps blood: a heart which fails to pump blood is obviously unhealthy. Gonads produce reproductive cells and introduce them to sexual partners: a set of gonads which don't produce such cells, or fail to introduce them to sexual partners, is obviously unhealthy.

At a higher level, an organism is a mechanism for propagating genes. An organism which propagates its genes fulfills its function; one which does not fails to fulfill its function (note that ensuring the propagation of one's relatives' similar genes can count as a partial fulfillment at least).

I think that the pill is supposed to "cope" with potential unwanted pregnancy, not with periods.

> Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

Are you saying that problems are normal and healthy?

Thanks, I can read. My point is, while this might be a desirable side-effect, this is not the reason women are on the pill.

Actually, a lot of women who have really bad periods sometimes specifically go on the pill to reduce their intensity. Source: friends in med school who have gone through their ob-gyn rotations.

Wow, I had no idea. Thanks.

Just to add to mkaziz's info, my wife specifically went on the pill in her teens, and was on it through her early through mid twenties specifically to address how painful her periods were.

Its not well known, but some women's periods can be debilitating (several days where you experience intense pain and cramping, where you don't even want to get out of bed).

Normal healthy body function is getting pregnant many times throughout your life. Just because periods are what happens every month to a female body in current society doesn't mean it's normal or healthy.

There's reason to think that modern women having so many periods throughout their adult lives is at least partly to blame for higher incidences of various female-specific cancers (breast in particular, but also uterine and ovarian). Reducing the number of periods a woman has in her lifetime greatly reduces the risk of those cancers.

http://gladwell.com/john-rock-s-error/

Estrogen is carcinogenic.

1. http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10...

2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10688862

Estrogen can be administered with other compounds to reduce the chance of cancer from interaction with oxygen radicals:

http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10...

Anyways, there's always something that's going to cause cancer in your body until we determine a way of hardening the cellular death and reproduction systems.

There's a group of women who have all sorts of ugly side-effects from taking the pill.

It has its pros and cons like everything.

Just because some people suffer from side effects doesn't mean it's a bad option for everyone. Both medically speaking and from a maintenance point of view, the pill is still a good default for most women.

Cultural support may have dwindled into nothingness by now (especially in the US), but every single woman using it that I talked to said she enjoyed the amount of control it gave her and that it greatly increased her quality of life.

I can't imagine those who already know this measure of comfort and control would react positively to "hey, we'll take this away from you, but here, have a period tracker app in exchange". I realize it's a controversial hypothesis, but I suspect the market for period tracker apps is so large because the majority of women don't have access to, or even factual knowledge about, the alternative due to mostly cultural reasons.

Is it really such an issue in the US? I find that hard to believe. I can imagine it is not a popular subject, just like other subjects of hygiene. But that is not the same as being stigmatized.

Period trackers don't protect against STDs, and neither does 'the Pill'.

And like other "rhythm" based contraceptives, they are not great protection against pregnancy either.

A bit click-baity title since the product's USP is not even mentioned:

When to have unprotected intercourse with a 'lower' probability of getting pregnant

EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, please elaborate

That is explicitly mentioned in the article.

true, I was too fast but the mention in the article feels more like a side benefit, from what I heard it's one of the core features, here the snippet:

"They also can record when you had sex (Clue’s icon for protected sex is a man wearing a tie) or remind you to pack tampons"

There's a much longer snippet further down

Apparently you didn't read the article (It was not me who downvoted you, though). It's mentioned there that most apps come with a fat warning that it's absolutely not reliable.

I didn't downvote, but it seems like that's a minor selling point at best. The article mentions it, of course, but even as a male, I can imagine far more utility from the other predictive and tracking aspects than that.

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