Preglife Pregnancy App

As a privacy researcher, it sure is nice (and rare) to read a privacy policy where you can tell the company is trying to actually protect their users' privacy. Preglife's privacy policy is solid. This Sweden-based company does seem to care about, and think through how to protect, their users' privacy. They say they will never share or sell any of your data to third parties unless required to by law or as stipulated in a short list of instances in their privacy policy. We'd love to see that "as required by law" statement clarified a bit more to make it clear they won't do any voluntary disclosure of information to law enforcement. We also understand that at company based in Sweden is potentially going to be less likely to share data with US law enforcement under most circumstances (we hope!).

All in all, Preglife's privacy policy doesn't worry us too much. The best part is they say that users can chose to not register for an account and still use the app. This means that all the personal information you enter into the app will be stored locally on your device and not be processed by Preglife. That's great! It does mean that you won't be able to access that data from another device or retrieve it if it gets accidentally deleted. These feel like small trade-offs to make to protect your personal information though. If you do chose to register for a Preglife account, Preglife says to their Google Play store data safety page they can collect things like email address, user ID, address, and phone number and share that data with third-parties for account management, but hopefully not for advertising purposes.

Preglife's privacy policy also has an entire section on consent, which is amazing and another rare thing to find in privacy policies these days, from our experience. They make it clear when and for what consent is required, which is super nice. Because users can enter a good amount of personal information into Preglife if they chose. Things like email address, estimated due date, data about your child like birth date and age, pictures, pregnancy diary notes, and more. Fortunately, users can choose to not register with the app and keep all this personal information stored locally on their phone where Preglife won't process it.

They do say they "may share aggregate demographic information about Preglife members with third-party organizations and companies as well as with the authorities, Such information cannot be used to identify individual Users" and "We may also share information at aggregate levels with third parties that carry out analyses on our behalf." This is fairly common and aggregate demographic data is, hopefully, better than de-identified user data. Still, it's a good time to slip in this reminder that it has been found to be pretty easy to de-anonymize data, especially if location data is included.

Unfortunately, Preglife does slip up when it comes to their security practices. When we downloaded the device, we found we were able to create and login with the weak password "111111". That's not great. We would love to see them require a stronger password and if you do use this app, please use a stronger password. This weak password requirement, as well as the fact that we were unable to confirm they use encryption at transit and at rest and they have a way to manage security vulnerabilities, means they don't meet our Minimum Security Standards. We did email them four times asking for answers to our privacy-related questions at the address listed in their privacy policy. Unfortunately we never heard back from them, which is a bummer, we love to see companies be more responsive to privacy-related questions from both us and from their users.

What's the worst that could happen with Preglife? Well, we'd hate to see a user download this app because the company does seem to do pretty good with respecting their users' privacy, set the app up and use "111111" as a crappy, weak password, the phone falls into the wrong hands after a miscarried pregnancy, and someone is able to guess the password, access all that personal information, and use against it against someone to raise questions about why their pregnancy ended. No one needs that after the tragedy of a miscarriage. We really hope that never happens! Please always use strong password people!