Privacy check for women: how your data is being used in 2024

From CEOs to startups and everything in between, female empowerment – both on a social level and in the workplace – are at an all-time high. Even so, women of all ages still face specific challenges across the industry – especially when it comes to privacy and individual rights.

Several topics, such as the pitfalls of cyberstalking and AI misogyny, we’ve covered in the past year, while others may be eye-opening for some. As always, the first step towards greater freedom is to keep informed.

Reproductive health

Since the late 2000s, tech companies have been searching for innovative ways to connect technology with women’s health issues, creating its own market known as “femtech”.

Coined in 2016 by the founder of Clue, one of the first menstrual-tracking apps, femtech includes any technology product, software, or service that helps to monitor female health.

From tracking birth control, ovulation cycles, fertility treatments, and menopause to having access to online health records, making doctor’s appointments, and creating forums for women to share experiences in healthcare – in some ways, the technology industry has helped women advocate for their own health in ways they had never felt comfortable doing before.

According to a 2022 UK study of women aged 18 to 65 years old by research group Thrive, 44% of women said they felt they were not taken seriously by health professionals.

The numbers also showed more than 35% felt that their doctors did not understand women’s lives or their bodies.

The femtech market alone is estimated to reach approximately $7.5 billion in 2024 and is forecasted to nearly double by 2029.

Where things get slippery is that the more women use these apps, the more women must also advocate to protect the data they collect.

A 2022 JMIR European data privacy survey of nearly two dozen women’s health apps found that most apps allowed behavioral tracking, more than 60% tracked user locations, and over 90% shared user data with third parties.

Since the landmark overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the US Supreme Court, privacy and women’s rights groups have warned, justifiably so, that the personal data collected from these apps could be used to prosecute women seeking or having abortions.

Women must also be alert to the possibility that any security breach of these femtech products and services, healthcare facilities, doctors’ offices, and even personal devices could leak this private information into the public domain.

This exposure could result in legal prosecution, professional persecution, reputational damage, financial extortion by threat actors, and even discrimination from health insurance companies.

And finally, as reproductive technology continues to evolve, women must also be diligent about protecting their sensitive data regarding adoption, surrogacy, and other in-vitro fertilization procedures.

Online intimidation

Cyberbullying, cyberstalking, revenge porn, and the threat of sexual predators are just some of the serious concerns facing all women, elementary school-age and beyond.

From jealous boyfriends, romantic relationships gone bad, or interacting with strangers on social media, online forums, and through multiple dating apps, balancing the pitfalls of modern-day digital norms with female mental health and physical safety continue to be at the forefront of women’s everyday lives.

Education is paramount to teaching young girls how to navigate these ever-present threats. Yet, we must also pressure our governments to create unified laws that will successfully protect victims and prosecute violators.

Perpetrators of cyberbullying and cyberstalking use any or all forms of digital communication to threaten their victims in order to cause fear and intimidation. Usually, these cyber acts are carried out repeatedly, over a lengthy period of time, and by someone, the victim knows. Such actions can seriously harm victims and even be a catalyst for suicide.

By definition, cyberbullying refers to children currently in school, aged 12 to 18 years of age, whereas cyberstalking denotes adults 18 years and older being victimized.

A difference between the two can also be seen in the methods used by perpetrators.

Cyberbullying can include text, email, social media, online forums, search engine manipulation, and fake website creation. Cyberstalking predators tend to up the ante, using more advanced tactics such as online sexual harassment, targeted smear campaigns, blackmail, and financial extortion.

Cyberstalkers can hack into a victim’s online accounts to change information, deploy digital spyware on their devices, or even create fake accounts or profiles to interact with their target under a false digital persona or alias.

Revenge pornography is another specific form of sexual harassment where explicit images or videos of the victim are either distributed or posted online without their consent.

A research by the UN Gender Equality Organization revealed that online threats of violence against women were a major deterrent for females all over the world, preventing them from publicly advocating for social change, taking leadership roles, or running for political office. Some of these threats have even come from the victim’s own government.

Besides education and following cybersecurity best practices when protecting women from online harassment, the most significant challenges are often the legal requirements needed to prosecute the offenders.

In many Western nations, cyberstalkers are often protected by free speech. By posting anonymously, offenders are able to hide behind their own ‘right to privacy.’

In the US, challenges to prosecute perpetrators are numerous, including a lack of police resources, high costs to follow through with full prosecution in court, and issues with jurisdiction.

Regarding legal jurisdiction, because each of the fifty states has its own cyberstalking laws, it is often almost impossible to prosecute a cyberstalker located in a different state from the victim unless it is a federal case.

READ MORE: Cyberstalking and cyber harassment: knowing the laws and your rights

AI and tech industry bias

With the explosive emergence of AI-driven large language learning models such as ChatGPT, industry experts question how well digital intelligence will be able to disseminate information through machine learning – without adopting an underlying bias towards the female gender.

Even after years of blatant discrimination from their ‘tech bro’ counterparts, women still struggle to be equally represented throughout the technology industry, both down in the trenches and in leadership positions.

Research shows the overall female experience working in the tech industry is demoralizing at best.

Besides a significant pay gap, sexist and unfair treatment ranged from normalized abuse and harassment to discrimination and misogyny, and in some cases, explicit death threats, according to research led by Professor Vandana Singh at the University of Tennessee.

The research also found women’s expertise was challenged, their contributions ill-received, and their work roles consistently diminished. It’s no wonder that more than half of women leave the industry by age 35, according to research by Accenture and Girls Who Code.

These examples of prejudice faced by women only demonstrate why it is so important – not just in the tech world, but within society as a whole – to be cognizant of potential bias when all of the AI deep-learning models released to date, have been engineered by mostly white men.

This bias exists not only towards women but against many other minority groups, as well. Facial-recognition software has been shown to tend to be biased toward people of color, according to experiments carried out in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias, which exposed how AI algorithms discriminate in employment, banking, insurance, dating, policing, and social media.

The first inkling of AI bias dates back to 2015 when Amazon engineers attempted to build an AI program to help sort through job applicants. The software team discovered that the automated program, set to pick the best candidates, primarily recommended male applicants. Because most Amazon tech employees had been men over the past ten years, the AI essentially learned to exclude women from the mix.

Since AI learning is based on millions of pieces of data scraped from the web, it’s almost guaranteed there will be general biases towards women.

A research piece published by the Guardian and the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network found AI had a distinct bias towards misclassifying images of women as ‘sexual,’ as compared to similar photos of men that escaped such categorization.

AI would tag the photos as sexually explicit, limiting their exposure on the internet, a process called shadowbanning. The study found many of the images actually depicted women in benign settings, such as during a medical examination or swimming in the ocean wearing a bathing suit.

There are a variety of ways AI biases come about, according to AI ethics research by scientist Lorenzo Belenguer. Examples include data sets based on historical references, lack of geographical diversity, inappropriate benchmarks for evaluation, and/or information provided to the AI based on demographics, such as age, accepted social behaviors, and cultural norms.

A study by female researchers from the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership says in about 70% of cases, these gender biases are detrimental to women, causing a reduced quality of services, misallocation of resources, and reinforcement of negative stereotypes.

The same study also lists several suggestions social justice leaders and AI developers can try and implement to help keep these biases in check.

Some of the proposed ideas include embedding diversity into the AI design and training process, filling in blanks using “feminist data” to assist in deep learning, creating AI governance, conducting algorithm audits, and advocating for AI literacy.