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
What is the actual goal here and will this behavior achieve that goal? Are we...
Adding a bunch of bullshit fictional data into a database that contains and will continue to gather legitimate data.
It strikes me that this would make the entire dataset less useful for legitimate medical research while not really doing much against targeted attacks. I could see some women's health researchers using anonymized data from something like this, and noise from people vomiting into it in protest would destroy it for that use. Or, you'd notice a bunch of accounts all join at about the same time making nonsensical data and just ignore the data from the accounts that joined around that time. Meanwhile I doubt this will stop the Gestation Gestapo from correlating genuine data with the actual identity of its owner.
Are you going to try to input obviously fake data? Make an attempt at realistic data? Try to trigger a Gestation Gestapo death squad, trying to make the service useless via false positives?
Or run up the service's data bills and maybe take up some of their cloud storage with fake data?
Start adding bullshit fictional data coinciding with women genuinely leaving the service
What would this accomplish that just having women stop using the thing do?
I've been trying to make that point for over a decade now. I think I get to unironically drop this xkcd. The alt text mentions diaspora, lol.
I think people mistakenly believe it will make it harder to identify/charge women who have miscarriages/abortions. Your comment is 100% accurate though and although it's nice to see men expressing what they view as solidarity by downloading these apps, ultimately it will have no effect and just mess with data being used for public good. Really wish whichever CEO started this trend to get more downloads for their app gets found out, because I can't imagine who else would suggest people download an app thats main claim to fame is "respects privacy so little it can send you to jail" lol.