Pregnancy apps raise fresh privacy concerns

The computer engineers at BabyCenter are often the first people women tell they are pregnant. Mothers-to-be go to babycenter.com or sign up for the site's mobile app to get advice long before they clear the first trimester and begin sharing their news with friends. Sometimes even before telling their husbands.

"When women register, they tell us their due date," said Julie Dempsey, BabyCenter's vice-president of product. "Not many apps are able to capitalise on that the way we are."

Marketers consider pregnancy data to be some of the most lucrative, as having a baby usually sparks a family spending spree that can establish life-long brand loyalties. BabyCenter, now owned by Johnson & Johnson, has exploited the trend with stroller and nappy advertisements since its website was established in 1997. But the massive migration of expectant and new mothers to smartphones has made mobile apps a new advertising opportunity for marketers and is raising fresh privacy concerns.

BabyCenter was named on Wednesday as one of 12 companies newly targeted by the US Senate Commerce Committee's investigation into data brokers and their collection of health information for use in advertising.

"Data about women's reproductive health is particularly sensitive because of the negative ways people have used it," said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Health-related mobile apps - particularly reproductive health apps that allow women to track menstruation cycles, pregnancy, and early baby development - have spiked in popularity, with hundreds available for download in the Apple and Google stores. My Pregnancy Today, made by Baby Center, along with iPeriod, Period Tracker Lite, and My Days Period & Ovulation are among the top 20 most visited health apps, as measured by ComScore.

Large multinational companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Target have found women's health and pregnancy apps particularly appealing, flooding them with ads for tampons and a range of personal care and baby products, or trying to acquire them. The frequent and routine use of such health trackers creates many opportunities to collect data and deliver ads. P&G is even building its own period and pregnancy tracking apps.

Car companies, property agents, and financial and insurance industry executives also want in on the game, recognising that pregnant women often consider serious purchases and investments for the first time as they plan for the future of their family.

"There is a strong push in the west to use mobile to create personal connections with women, knowing you can customise and tailor the conversation you'll have with them as a brand," said Emma Montgomery, global product director of SMG's Human Experience Center, a research arm of Starcom MediaVest Group.

Sonia Pasquali, BabyCenter's director of product management, says pregnancy is "a huge inflection point in becoming more mobile".

"With a baby, women don't have time to sit in front of the computer any more," she adds. They do not have time to sit in front of the television either, or read magazines or newspapers, making mobile platforms increasingly more important to advertisers who want to reach them.

Many developers rely on advertising in order to offer their apps to consumers for free, raising concern among privacy advocates about how the sensitive data collected by these apps is shared, and with whom.

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Leon Atkinson-Derman, the creator of iPeriod, says any data shared for advertising from his app is always aggregated and otherwise stored in a military grade, biometrically secured data centre. "We built iPeriod off of trust," he said. "Other companies out there sell everything."

That could include information about a user's age, gender, location, or the Facebook or Twitter ID some apps use for login purposes, said Dave Lee, chief executive of GP Apps, which makes Period Tracker Lite.

"But we do not agree with this behaviour because of our value placed on user privacy," he said in an email. He said his company relies mainly on paid app upgrades for its revenues.

My Days Period & Ovulation did not respond to several requests for comment.

SMG's Ms Montgomery said advertisers must tread carefully into mobile.

"It's a personal device, and with period trackers, it's a really personal subject, and you don't want to creep out the customer," she said. "You [don't want to] create this app she relies on and then ruin it by delivering something that seems like you know her too well."

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