'We follow strict protocols' - popular period tracking app hits back at backlash
After the damning report from University of Cambridge that select period tracking apps are harvesting and selling user information, popular tracking app Clue has set the record straight.
Clue is a science-based, data-driven menstrual and reproductive health app, trusted by 10 million people globally, and despite their mission to help women - has come under scrutiny following the release of a report from University of Cambridge's Minderoo Centre.
The report said the tracking apps were a "gold mine" for consumer profiling. By collecting customer data, it could allow companies to produce targeted advertisements linked to information users think is kept private.
Under EU and UK law, the data from these period-tracking apps comes under a special category, which means it should have special protections from being sold on - but this report highlights that consent options are not always enforced or implemented. This then allows the data can be sold to advertisers and tech giants such as Facebook and Google.
However Clue has assured users the app follows "strict protocols" when it comes to how data is managed, and said keeping their users safe is at their "core".
Clue CEO Rhiannon White told The Mirror: "We adhere to the very strict standards the European GDPR sets for data security and storage. This applies to the data we hold regardless of where in the world our users are located. Our policy and firm commitment is that no matter where our users are in the world, we will never allow their private health data to be used against them.
"We have never disclosed such data to any authority, and we never will. Anything that does not fundamentally serve female health and the empowerment of people with cycles would be at odds with our principles at Clue," she added.
One of Clue's missions is to help close the research gap in women's health and White assured that when using the data for research, Clue takes the "utmost care and follow strict protocols".
She said gaining insight from de-identified data is an "important part of our mission" because the historical lack of data for research into female health is a major contributing factor to the health gap, so will share this anonymised data with researchers from leading global institutions, such as Stanford and University of Oxford.
"It is up to each user whether they want to help to close that data gap by consenting to their de-identified data being used for this purpose, which is why we offer granular consent options," and added: "This de-identified data is only shared with user consent and all research projects are carefully vetted against our strict criteria to ensure they're in the interest of our community.
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"We have never and will never sell or share sensitive data with advertisers, insurers or data brokers. That is not our business model -– our business model is direct to consumer subscriptions, ensuring that our users are our customers, and we serve them."
Rhiannon further detailed that the third party tools Clue uses to work are "vetted and assessed" against the strictest GDPR standards and assured they transparently detail exactly what data is handled by each tool and how in the privacy policy.
"Our servers are located in the EU in Germany and in Ireland. When your data is sent between your device and our Clue servers, we use encrypted data transmission, which scrambles the information being sent so it's unreadable. Doing this increases the security of your data transfer," she added.
But the researchers from the Cambridge study warn that by collecting information, it could allow companies to produce targeted advertisements linked to information users think is kept private. They also worry that if this data gets into the wrong hands, it could even affect access to abortion, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking as well as risks to job prospects.
"There are real and frightening privacy and safety risks to women as a result of the commodification of the data collected by cycle tracking app companies," said Dr Stefanie Felsberger, the lead author of the report. The report calls on organisations such as the NHS and other health bodies to create a "safer" alternative that is trustworthy.
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse
'We can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,' says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. 'I'm pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I'm optimistic about people.' Kemp's new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Today's global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots. The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. 'Don't be a dick' is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. 'When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don't see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,' he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. 'Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.' Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David's slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile. Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of 'Goliath fuel'. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be 'seen, stolen and stored', Kemp says, unlike perishable foods. In Cahokia, for example, a society in North America that peaked around the 11th century, the advent of maize and bean farming led to a society dominated by an elite of priests and human sacrifice, he says. The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel 'caged land', meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example. 'History is best told as a story of organised crime,' Kemp says. 'It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.' All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: 'They are cursed and this is because of inequality.' Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more. Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. 'Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.' History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. 'After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,' he says. Collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. 'Today, we don't have regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,' Kemp says. He cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. 'In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons,' he says. Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. 'Today, most of us are specialised, and we're dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,' he says. 'Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,' he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk. Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. 'The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.' 'Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,' he says. 'They're basically amplifying the worst of us.' Kemp points to these 'agents of doom' as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. 'These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,' he says. 'Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry. 'The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.' The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. 'First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,' he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says. 'If you'd had a citizens' jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: 'Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation campaigns'? Of course not,' Kemp says. Escaping collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to rig the democratic system. 'I'd cap wealth at $10 million. That's far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk of destroying the entire planet?' If citizens' juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. 'It's always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That's because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,' he says. 'Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It's complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We're a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we're built for.' Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. 'There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,' he says. 'Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That's just making our economy more honest.' He also has a message for individuals: 'Collapse isn't just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don't be a dick. Don't work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don't accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.' Despite the possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects. 'I think it's unlikely,' he says. 'We're dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics. 'But even if you don't have hope, it doesn't really matter. This is about defiance. It's about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn't contribute to the problem.' Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp was published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin
Reuters
16 hours ago
- Reuters
Exclusive: Prosus set to win EU nod for $4.74 billion Just Eat deal, sources say
BRUSSELS, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Dutch technology investor Prosus is set to win EU antitrust approval for its 4.1 billion euro ($4.7 billion) bid for Just Eat Takeaway ( opens new tab, after agreeing to sell down its stake in Delivery Hero ( opens new tab, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Amsterdam-headquartered Prosus, which is majority owned by South Africa's Naspers (NPNJn.J), opens new tab, announced the deal in February, banking on its artificial intelligence capability to boost Just Eat Takeaway, Europe's biggest meal delivery company. Prosus last month offered to incrementally sell down its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero and to give up its board seat to address EU competition concerns, other people familiar with the matter had told Reuters. Delivery Hero and Just Eat Takeaway compete with each other in Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland and Spain. The European Commission, which is now seeking market feedback to Prosus' offer and will decide on the deal by August 11, declined to comment. Prosus also declined to comment. The deal would make Prosus the world's fourth-largest food delivery company after Meituan ( opens new tab, DoorDash (DASH.O), opens new tab and Uber (UBER.N), opens new tab, according to ING analysts. Delivery Hero and its Spanish unit Glovo were fined 329 million euros by the EU antitrust watchdog in June for taking part in a cartel which included an agreement to divide up markets among themselves and not to poach each other's employees. ($1 = 0.8658 euros)
Scottish Sun
a day ago
- Scottish Sun
‘Suspicious' antivax mum accuses paramedics of ‘killing' model daughter after she refused ‘lifesaving' cancer treatment
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) CONSPIRACY theorist Kay "Kate" Shemirani has accused paramedics of killing her daughter after she refused lifesaving cancer treatment, an inquest has heard. Paloma Shemirani, a 23-year-old University of Cambridge graduate, collapsed on July 19 last year and was taken to Royal Sussex County Hospital. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 9 Paloma Shemirani died from a heart attack after being diagnosed with cancer Credit: Facebook 9 Paloma's mum, Kate, is a notorious anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Credit: Alamy 9 The 23-year-old turned down treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma Credit: Facebook She died just five days later, on July 24 of a heart attack. Just months earlier, Paoloma, who was a finalist in Miss Universe Great Britain 2021, had declined treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma - a type of blood cancer which starts in the lymph nodes. Her mother, Kate who rose to prominence on social media while sharing Covid-19 conspiracy theories, said her daughter "deteriorated catastrophically" when paramedics intervened. Kate, who was involved in Paloma's "alternative treatment" called her friend before calling an ambulance the day her daughter collapsed, the inquest at Kent and Medway Coroner's Court in Maidstone, heard. Read more on Paloma TRAGIC DEATH Mum 'sacrificed' daughter for her anti-vax views' after she turned down chemo On Wednesday, reading a prepared witness statement, she accused the inquest of "attempting to shift focus" from the "real" cause of Paloma's death. "Any attempt to place responsibility on me is false - the people who need to be answering are those who failed to confirm diagnosis, administered drugs without her consent which could have damaged her heart," said Kate. Kate told the court that a "sequence of medical actions" caused her daughter's death, which she claimed amounted to "gross negligence manslaughter". She claims that while in hospital in December 2023, Paloma was given medication without her consent and felt "pressured and bullied" by medical staff. "I became very suspicious and deeply concerned about what was happening," Kate told the coroner. Paloma's twin brother, Gabriel Shemirani, suggests that when Paloma was first diagnosed, she was considering chemotherapy, before their parents started to pressure her against it. Son of anti-vax nurse being probed by cops for comparing NHS medics to Nazis slams 'arrogant' mum Kate was struck off as a nurse in 2021, having qualified in the 1980s and a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) committee found she had spread Covid-19 misinformation that "put the public at a significant risk of harm". After her stay in hospital in December 2023, Paloma began an alternative treatment programme which included daily coffee enemas, a strict diet and green juices, the inquest heard previously. "Paloma made her own treatment choices based on her values, research and experiences," said Kate. She added that her daughter was "never a victim of coercion" and that she "continued to improve physically" under her alternative medicines. "She was determined to get well on her own terms and this is well documented in her own high court statement which was read out in this coroner's hearing" said Kate. On the day she collapsed, she had an appointment with an osteopath, Nick Gosset, who described her on Wednesday as "a young lady who was in the last stages of a very difficult disease" and said he advised she seek medical help. 9 Paloma's twin brother, Gabriel Shemirani, previously blamed Kate for her death Credit: PA 9 Paloma was considered chemo before her parents got involved, Gabriel claims Credit: Facebook 'She's dying' Today, her mother disagreed saying: "On the morning of July 19 Paloma was well. "She looks healthy and good colour ... she was smiling and laughing, she was not as described yesterday by the osteopath." Paloma collapsed at home later that day, and her mother called her friend who then called an ambulance while they initiated CPR. On the 999 call played to the court, Kate was heard shouting "she's dying" to the operator before the paramedics arrived. She also told the ambulance operator "it's difficult to lie her on her front because she has a medicinal mass" in her throat, the inquest heard. In her evidence, Kate told the court that when the paramedics arrived they administered adrenaline "then everything went horribly wrong" following their intervention and her daughter went into "full circulatory collapse". "I knew at this point that they'd done something, given something that had caused this," she said. 9 Paloma began an alternative treatment programme which included daily coffee enemas, a strict diet and green juices Credit: Facebook 9 Kate told the court that a 'sequence of medical actions' caused her daughter's death Credit: Facebook 9 Kate has has accused paramedics of killing the Cambridge grad Kate added: "She deteriorated catastrophically upon their arrival and their intervention." Dr Anderson said Paloma received a standard adult dose of adrenaline during the cardiac arrest, and that this was acceptable even given how thin she was at the time. Paloma was taken to Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton on a ventilator, and brain stem death was declared on the afternoon of July 24, 2024 after a series of nationally advised medical checks. 'Trying to conceal cause of death' Kate said the decision taken was rushed and said that the brain stem testing was not the same in the UK as it was in the US, and wanted an MRI. Intensivist and anaesthetist Dr Peter Anderson, who was on shift when Paloma died, explained: "I thought the risk of deterioration and uncontrolled death was extremely high." Dr Anderson noted that on the 999 call, Kate called out Paloma's oxygen saturation which was "critically low" at 36 then 35. He told the coroner that if Paloma's 'sats' were that low for a significant time then the brain damage was done before the paramedics arrived. Kate said: "We are deeply concerned this inquest is attempting to shift focus on the cause of death." Later she added: "We believe this to be an attempt to pervert the course of justice and conceal the cause of Paloma's death." The inquest continues. 9 Paloma received a standard adult dose of adrenaline during the cardiac arrest from the paramedics, a doctor said Credit: Facebook
