It was only when we started building TALIA — out of a need and unable to find what I wanted — that I began to look properly at what happens to the kind of ‘sensitive’ data that women share as part of the menopause transition. And once you start looking into it, it quickly becomes a bit of a rabbit hole. Not one most women would choose to go down. So I’ll try and keep this simple. If you are using an app to track your health, you are recording some of the most personal information about yourself. And most of us have not stopped to ask the obvious question:
Where is all of that data actually going?
Because when you strip the issue back, menopause data doesn’t really fit the “wellness” label — it is deeply personal. It can tell a story about your body, your mind, your confidence, your symptoms and your vulnerabilities, including your sex life and work life. The UK ICO is clear that health information is special category data requiring a greater level of protection under GDPR. That framework exists for good reason. But it only works if the apps you are using are actually subject to it — and many operating here are headquartered in the US, where the rules are different. In women’s health, this is not some abstract future risk. In 2021, the US Federal Trade Commission finalised an order against Flo Health, alleging that despite promising to keep users’ health data private, it shared sensitive health data from millions of users with marketing and analytics firms, including Facebook and Google. There are also organisations prepared to expose poor practice and rank apps on their privacy standards — the Wall Street Journal has investigated this space, and independent researchers have put popular apps to the test. We built TALIA differently — and it is one of the reasons our own daughters use it for period tracking and birth control reminders. They are perfectly comfortable using technology. They are not anti-app. But like many younger women, they are more aware that convenience and privacy are not always on the same side.
Do free menopause apps sell your data?
Many menopause apps do share user data with third parties. In 2021, the US Federal Trade Commission acted against Flo Health for sharing health data from millions of users with marketing firms including Facebook and Google — despite promising to keep it private. The way something is funded shapes what it becomes. A lot of digital health products are built with outside investment, and that investment usually comes with expectations: growth, scale and a return. It is fair to say that once a product has to generate a very large return, the pressure on the business model changes. And in tech, data has value. That is why “free” and “freemium” deserve a second look. And it leads to a fairly uncomfortable question:
If you’re not paying for the product, what is?
Researchers at the University of Cambridge answer this pretty clearly. Dr Stefanie Felsberger, lead author of a 2025 report on menstrual and reproductive health apps, said they are often presented as empowering women, yet the business model behind their services rests on commercial use, selling user data and insights to third parties for profit. She also warned of real and frightening privacy and safety risks linked to the commodification of that data. This pattern isn’t new. In 2022, Mozilla Foundation researcher Misha Rykov found that best practices for privacy by design had existed for years — but most leading reproductive health apps chose to ignore them. Once you start seeing your data as valuable, you also start seeing why privacy is not a small print issue. It is a product issue. And it extends beyond apps. Wearables, AI tools, even the chatbot you asked about your symptoms last week — the same questions apply. Where does the data go? Who can see it? What are they allowed to do with it? Most of us don’t know, because we were never really asked to think about it. It has become complex enough that Bethany Corbin, a US health and innovation legal professional, has written a book and developed a framework specifically to help women assess how apps handle their data. That this requires a legal framework at all tells you something. Three questions worth getting into the habit of asking before you download anything: Is it free — and if so, why? Where is your data stored? Does it require an account to use? The Femtech Shield has put together a practical set of tips for staying safe that’s well worth a look. TALIA was designed as a native iOS app with on-device storage and processing. No account. No central server. No cloud database holding your personal menopause log. We cannot see your data because we simply do not have it. That was not the easiest route, but for us it was the right one.
Privacy isn’t a policy. It’s built in from the start.
Because we originally built TALIA for me — a 50-year-old perimenopausal woman who wanted a simple tool to help manage a complex transition — the value was always in the tool itself. Not in the data behind it or what that data might be worth later. As it developed, through requests from friends, we knew we were building for women in midlife. Women who are often juggling work, families, ageing parents, relationships, brain fog, poor sleep and the slow realisation that they do not quite feel like themselves. I knew exactly what mattered. Not as a developer looking in, but as the target audience looking out. What felt intrusive. What felt unnecessary. What would make me close an app and never reopen it. Building from that position meant privacy wasn’t a feature we debated — it was a given. As a result of this approach, we believe we’ve built something genuinely useful.
Not anti-data
I hope this doesn’t sound like we are against better use of data in women’s health. Quite the opposite. Women’s health has suffered for years because of data gaps. The Women’s Health Strategy for England explicitly says there are gaps in the data and evidence base around menopause, and that existing datasets should be improved and new ones established. Clinicians and researchers feel this acutely — the evidence base for how women actually experience this phase of life is thinner than it should be, and that has real consequences for care. We absolutely need better data. But it has to be done properly. So our position is simple. We want to help bridge the data gap in women’s health, but only ethically, transparently and in partnership with clinicians and researchers. As former doctor Jasmine Fletcher wrote recently: “these shouldn’t be individual dilemmas, they should be collectively solved problems”. Anonymous or properly anonymised data may well have a role to play in that future, but even there the detail matters. Guidance used in UK health research is clear that anonymisation has to sufficiently mitigate re-identification risk — and that takes care and governance, especially with individual-level health data. That is why TALIA stage one deliberately disregarded the data opportunity altogether. We’ve raised a generation to be careful about what they share online. Perhaps it’s time we applied the same thinking to ourselves — and started asking the questions we taught them to ask. TALIA is a private menopause app that connects symptoms, treatments and time. Bringing it all together so you can see what’s happening, what’s changing, and what’s working — without your data ever leaving your device. This article was first published on the TĀLIA Substack. Read it there or subscribe for future articles.
