Clue vows to safeguard users following the 2024 election amid concerns anti-abortion state laws could allow phone searches for menstrual data.

The team behind menstrual health and period tracking app Clue has said it will not disclose users’ data to American authorities, following Donald Trump’s reelection.

The message comes in response to concerns that during Trump’s second presidency, abortion bans that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 will worsen and states will attempt to increase menstrual surveillance in order to further restrict access to terminations.

    • TachyonTele@lemm.eeEnglish
      181·
      12 days ago

      How does an app being FOSS defend them from warrants?

      Edit. Thank you guys for the details. I learneded something new today, much appreciated.

      • gaiussabinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        351·
        12 days ago

        FOSS implies it’s your hardware, therefore a subpoena would extract no information because there is no information outside of the users device.

          • mosiacmango@lemm.eeEnglish
            23·
            12 days ago

            “Free and open source software.” It’s an ethos that says that code should be free and open for people to use and improve as they see fit. The core of it is that if you modify any software that is FOSS, your software must also be FOSS. So overtime the software and what its used for improve, change, widen. Lucky for us, the movement has been ongoing for 50+ years, so it’s a mature ethos whose benefits are everywhere. Most of the internet runs on FOSS. Lemmy itself is FOSS.

            It doesn’t necessarily mean an app is more private, but it does mean you can generally self host, as the commentor said. There isn’t a profit motive with most FOSS, at least not at its core, so there is little desire to data harvest generally. There is also a heavy overlap between FOSS advocates and privacy advocates, so they tend to be more privacy conscious via local data storage or encryption.

            • AliasVortex@lemmy.worldEnglish
              9·
              12 days ago

              Just to key in on the overlap between FOSS and privacy, because the source code for the software is open, it means that anyone can take a peek at how everything is running under the hood (among other things). It becomes possible to verify that software is storing data locally and properly encrypting when applicable (as opposed to blindly trusting the software’s author and or lawyers).

              It may also be a fun fact that best practice in encryption is to open source your algorithms. The helps safeguard against backdoors and mistakes/ errors that could compromise the security of the algorithm. Much for similar reasons as above, as it allows the security community to check your math (in a field where it is incredibly easy to get your math wrong).

            • TachyonTele@lemm.eeEnglish
              4·
              12 days ago

              Ok yeah, I understood everything in your first paragraph. The privacy part was what I was really asking about. So if you’re not self hosting you’re still at the whim of the person/company/whatever that is.

              • ch00f@lemmy.worldEnglish
                7·
                12 days ago

                You could also argue that if even if you’re not self-hosting (i.e. renting server hardware from a 3rd party), your data is still in a siloed environment. While it may be accessible by law enforcement if you are targeted specifically, it’s unlikely to be dragnetted like the data collected from popular apps.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        16·
        12 days ago

        Something being FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe / ethical, but a LOT of FOSS apps are designed with those principles in mind.

        However, being FOSS means that if an app claims that it is safe / ethical (ex. In this case, not storing data anywhere but on your device), you or an experienced peer can check the code to verify that fact.

      • Pirky@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        12 days ago

        It doesn’t, but with these apps, you can see what information they send back to their servers (if any). If there is no info getting sent back to any servers, then there’s nothing a subpoena can do since there’s no info to subpoena. You can’t obtain info that just isn’t there.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        41·
        12 days ago

        Simple. Most FOSS are built for privacy and thus do not harvest data to send to some server somewhere in the world for whatever obscure reason. The data is locally stored on your device and stays and dies there.

        No callback, no selling nor surrending data.

        Personally speaking, I’d quicker have all data banks destroyed than surrendered to whatever purposes, if I ever decided to build an aplication that somehow compiled data.