Babycenter

Everyday Health, the company that owns pregnancy app Babycenter (and the pregnancy app What to Expect too), just comes right out and admits they plan to sell personal information they collect on you. At least they are honest and straightforward about it in their lengthy and dense privacy policy, we'll give them that.

Selling your personal information isn't all they plan to do with it either. They say they can share it with lots of third party advertisers for targeted behavioral advertising. They can take your data and gather more data on you from sources like social media, public sources, and data brokers to build an even bigger profile on you with all your data. They say they they can use that data for lots of personalization and targeted marketing and advertising to try and sell you more goods and services. It seems there is a whole lot of money to be made using the personal information of pregnant women and expecting families. Which makes sense when they say they can collect a whole lot of your personal information — everything from your name, email, phone number to your due date, gender of your baby, education, work experience, precise location, browsing history, views and opinions, photographs, and much more. Yikes!

We're not even sure all users can request this data they collect on you be deleted if that want. Everyday Health was actually kinda vague about that in their privacy policy and we're not clear if users outside of the EU and California who are protected by stronger privacy laws have the same rights to access and delete their data. Not good.

And if you're worried this company could turn over to law enforcement that sensitive personal information they admit using to track you right there in the Apple app store data privacy section (seriously, go check that out), well, we're right there with you (and others are too). Their privacy policy says things like, "we may disclose your User Information to: […] legal and regulatory authorities, upon request" and "Subject to applicable law, we reserve the right to release information concerning any user of Services when we have grounds to believe that the user… has engaged in (or we have grounds to believe is engaging in) any illegal activity, and to release information in response to court and governmental orders, other requests from government entities, civil subpoenas, discovery requests and otherwise as required by law or regulatory obligations." That seems to indicate Everyday Health might give up a users' data through voluntary disclosure, which is a policy we really kinda hate here at Mozilla. We much prefer when companies state they won't give up user data to law enforcement unless required to under subpoena, and even then, we like to see them commit to only giving up the bare minimum necessary.

What's the worst that could go what with the Babycenter pregnancy app. Holy crap, soooo much. It's possible your data could be sold and used to track and see if you were pregnant and there weren't which could flag you as someone who might have had an abortion, which is not great in our post Roe vs Wade world. It's also possible your data could be sold to someone looking to target pregnant women with crazy advertisements aimed at getting them to name their baby Superduperawesomechildnumerouno, and then we have a whole bunch of kids running around with that name, and yeah, we don't want that either. Seriously, though, there is a whole lot that could go wrong with a company that seems to disregard their user's privacy to the degree Everyday Health does. Please understand, this app comes with *Privacy Not Included.