Lily Soetebier (MSTC) recently took first place in the graduate division of the ACM SIGDOC Student Research Competition. Lily’s project, “Data After Dobbs: A Verbal Data Case Study of Flo’s Privacy Policies” emerged as a winner after a two-stage competition that included a poster presentation and a formal conference presentation.

Lily summarizes the project in this way:

“Following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Center decision (Dobbs Decision), the legal protections for reproductive healthcare in the United States became more ambiguous. These ambiguities extend to menstrual tracking, raising concerns as the data can be used to imply and infer, often incorrectly, that an abortion has taken place, opening up the possibility for wrongful prosecution (Cao et al., 2024). Previous research has established that the burden of evaluating privacy risks is left to the user (Song et al., 2024) and the majority of users are uncertain of how to protect their intimate data (Cao et al., 2024). Further, users are tasked with building a “biodigital literacy”, or an understanding of what health data they are sharing, how these services are evaluating their health, and what protections are in place to guard their health information (H. Swarts, 2024).This study sought to connect the concerns of prior research by providing a baseline understanding of the existing privacy policy documentation from Flo, a popular menstrual tracking app, through a two dimensional coding analysis.

The first dimension addresses the question: “How is Flo clarifying their policy to their users?”. The “clarification” coding dimension identifies the following moves: (1) providing examples and definitions, (2) rights, or actions Flo and Users can take on behalf of their data, (3) limits, actions Flo and users are not allowed to take, or structures that infringe on their ability to take action, and (4) metadiscourse. The second dimension expands on the work of Song et al.’s “Our Users’ Privacy is Paramount to Us”: A Discourse Analysis of How Period and Fertility Tracking App Companies Address the Roe v Wade Overturn” (2024), presented at the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. In their discourse analysis, Song et al. established a set of common values expressed in press statements released following the Dobbs decision from a variety of menstrual tracking applications, including Flo. To help trace intentionality in changes to clarifications observed, I included a thematic analysis of the following codes: (1) transparency, (2) legal compliance, (3) human rights, (4) technological features, and (5) user autonomy.

The results of this analysis are cautiously optimistic, with the language proving to shift in favor of simpler sentences, shown in the increase of both User-Rights and Flo-Rights codes, and the incorporation of empowering values with the increase in human rights codes from 8 in late 2022 to 18 in 2024. Identifying the current trajectory of privacy policies during this period of legal ambiguity establishes an updated baseline and provides the necessary jumping off point for technical communicators to continue advocating for user needs and protections.”

SIGDOC stands for the Special Interest Group on Documentation, a longstanding special interest group associated with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Throughout its years of existence, SIGDOC has attracted participation from technical communication scholars and industry practitioners alike.