When Yeeun Jo, a student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) contacted me in 2025 to ask about data tracking in app advertisements related to women's health and pregnancy I was a bit skeptical.

Given the FTC’s subsequent 2021 crack-down specifically targeting Flo Health for passing intimate logging metrics to Facebook and Google. I thought it was unlikely they'd find much.

Well, it's a year later and I was wrong.

Jo & Reaves found mobile apps and mobile ad networks were still tracking health data.

Their paper shows the high specificity which these events are tracked ...

Rest of my blog post & AppGoblin links (to see which apps using which ad networks currently) to the apps in paper:

https://jamesoclaire.com/2026/06/30/the-pregnancy-and-health...