Dr Lindsay Balfour, Senior Lecturer in Communications at the University of Glasgow, will deliver the 14th CRISP online seminar. The seminar is entitled 'Balancing the risks and rewards of privacy and surveillance in the intimate digital health ecosystem' and will take place at 1pm GMT on Wednesday 18th February 2026. To join the seminar, click on the 'Join the Seminar' link at the bottom of this page.  The link will become live 15 minutes before the start of the seminar

Abstract

In December 2018, the London-based charity Privacy International reported that many well-known menstruation apps were regularly sharing user data with social media channels. Of the 36 applications they tested, more than 61% immediately transferred data to Facebook, now Meta, when a user opened the app (Privacy International, 2018). Three years later, in 2021, the well-known ovulation app Flo reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after allowing the data accumulated by its almost 100 million users to be shared with third-party companies, including advertisers (Singer 2021).While these cases suggest a growing trend whereby digital health applications are routinely sharing user information, primarily with for-profit, third-party entities, it is also the tip of the iceberg of a much wider, and far more dangerous problem.

This talk takes a “risks versus rewards” approach, using the feminine health technologies industry (known as FemTech) as a case study to examine some of the most pressing privacy concerns associated with intimate health data. While I consider the broader effects of third-party brokerage, I am particularly interested in the weaponisation of data and the mining of personal health information to fuel gender-based violence on both interpersonal and structural levels. In particular, I highlight the rising risks of reproductive coercion, surveillance and intimate partner violence potentially enabled by menstrual tracking tools, now used by more than 250 million people globally (BBC, 2025). This talk will be useful for anyone concerned with how intimate health information is leveraged and how, despite the important benefits of digital health applications, women and other marginalised genders seem to be put disproportionately at risk when privacy is not safeguarded. It will also identify routes forward, including how users can navigate digital health with peace of mind, what policy and legislation can offer in response, and how the FemTech and wider digital health ecosystem can be supported in more robust attention to safety by design frameworks.

Biography

Lindsay Anne Balfour (She/her)is Senior Lecturer in Communications at the University of Glasgow. Her research is eclectic, drawing on media and communications theory, intersectional feminism, science and technology studies, and cultural studies to look at the risks and rewards of intimate heath technologies. In her funded projects, Lindsay has been co-building digital solutions and safety-by design frameworks for gender based violence, particularly in relation to the burgeoning “FemTech” industry. She works closely with partners across multiple sectors, using an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences lens to examine discourses of health and wellness, privacy, misinformation and digital harms in an effort to inform policy and encourage global health equity. Alongside this work she has published an edited collection FemTech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health in addition to two other monographs, several articles, and public reports. Her next article, forthcoming in March, looks at intimate surveillance in relation to the self-tracking capabilities of wearable smart rings.

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