A judge in the Supreme Court of British Columbia has given the green light for a lawsuit which claims that privacy the company behind an app used to monitor menstrual and fertility cycles has breached user privacy.
According to the ruling published online on Friday, the legal action against Flo Health Inc. accuses the company of sharing very personal health details of users with external parties like Facebook, Google and other firms.
The ruling explains that the Flo Health & Period Tracker app, which is accessible in over 100 countries and has millions of users worldwide, helps women keep track of all stages of their reproductive cycle.
The certified class-action decision would apply to more than one million users who provided personal information about their menstrual cycles, as well as other information regarding their body functions and the frequency of their sexual activity.
The proposed class-action lawsuit encompasses over a million Canadians who used the app between June 2016 and February 2019, with the exception of those in Quebec, where a separate lawsuit was certified in November 2022.
The lawsuit contends that Flo Health wrongly used users’ personal information for its own financial benefit, alleging violations of privacy, confidence and intrusion into personal matters.
The lawsuit was prompted by a ruling from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in which Flo Health confessed to sharing users’ private information about their menstrual cycles and pregnancies with data analysis divisions of Google, Facebook and two other companies.
Justice Lauren Blake of the Supreme Court of British Columbia approved the class-action and designated a representative plaintiff, stating that “the continuous ability to collect, store and access information in our digital era has led to a need to legally protect privacy.”
The ruling from Blake states, “Privacy laws have been acknowledged as having a quasi-constitutional status. Similarly, privacy violations such as intrusion into personal matters and breach of confidence are still developing, and their appropriate application in our modern world must be consistently addressed in our courts.”
