Flurry to pay $3.5 million for harvesting sexual and reproductive health data from period app

The defunct analytics company Flurry agreed to pay $3.5 million to resolve a class action lawsuit claiming it improperly harvested data from a widely used period tracking app.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit said data they provided to the app, Flo Health, was obtained by Flurry, the ad analytics company AppsFlyer, Meta and Google.

The settlement on Friday only resolves claims brought against Flurry. 

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, heard in a Northern California federal court, include all Flo Health users who entered menstruation and other sexual and reproductive health information into the app between November 2016 and February 2019.

Flurry allegedly provided Flo Health with a software development kit which allowed the firms to access data users shared with the app, according to the 2021 complaint. 

Flo Health marketed itself as the “#1 mobile product” for women’s health, according to the lawsuit. It had been installed more than 165 million times and more than 38 million people actively used it each month as of 2021, the complaint said.

Users provided Flo Health with personally identifying information like their addresses and dates of birth, as well as details about their sexual health, whether they experience pain during sex, how often they masturbate and how often they have sex, the complaint alleged.

Spokespersons for Google, Meta and AppsFlyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Flurry could not be located because the company is now defunct.