Trump’s return has women who use Oura smart ring to track periods panicking over privacy

In the week before the Republican candidate’s election victory, Google searches for ‘period tracking apps’ leaped in popularity.

Top queries included ‘Should I delete my period tracking app?’ and ‘Most private period tracking app.’

Some women are questioning the privacy of their ovulation and fertility data out of fear that it could be weaponized against them under a second Trump administration.

According to a study published by the Federal Trade Commission, penned by researchers and professors at Duke University, period-tracking apps “track and collect a vast amount of sensitive data, including menstrual cycle data, pregnancy, sex life, and location which can all be used to detect or infer abortions.”

Privacy concerns are “aggravated in the post-Roe v. Wade era, as law enforcement can now request fertility-related records from period-tracking app companies as evidence of crimes,” the report adds.  

The top two breakout searches for people googling the privacy of period tracking apps were related to the Oura ring—a Finnish wearable health device that tracks everything from body temperature and sleep duration to blood oxygen rate.

One feature that has also been popular with users is ‘cycle insights,’ which includes a period prediction tracker and potential pregnancy updates.

While Oura has been readily adopted by women as a powerful tool in a health system that often lets them down, this same demographic is now worried they have revealed too much of themselves to health tech companies.

Indeed, the ‘wearables’ market is expected to rapidly increase in size over the next few years, from a market value of $72 billion in 2023 to more than $186 billion by 2030—led by the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Garmin.

Oura is rapidly growing in kind.

More than 2.5 million people now wear one of the Finnish company’s titanium rings—priced from $299 to $499—with annual sales expected to double this year to roughly $500 million.

The company’s CEO, Tom Hale, knows that his customers are concerned they’ve shared too much. He said their private data is exactly that: Private.

Speaking to Fortune at Web Summit in Lisbon, Hale said: “We put a feature in the product that allows you to basically selectively delete your data from the app. And we did that under the request of users who asked for it.”

Hale highlighted that Oura, like other healthcare brands, is subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects individuals’ medical information and limits the extent to which their data can be shared without patient consent.

That being said, HIPAA does allow government and federal agencies to request information from healthcare providers for legal or public health reasons—a cause of concern for women questioning how far a Trump administration might enforce abortion regulation.

When questioned on this point by Fortune, Hale said Oura would “do what our customers ask us to do and want us to do”—including taking action like completely anonymizing all data.

On top of that, Hale said Oura’s policy is to notify users if any of their data is being shared, giving women a window of opportunity to delete all of their historical data if they feel the need to.

Oura added: “As a company based in Finland, Oura is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, which means that we have technical and organizational safeguards to keep members’ data safe and secure under the heightened standards required by European privacy regulations.”

Reality or rhetoric

Hale believes that the question of whether to delete cycle data is a particular issue for Oura members because it has been so readily adopted by younger women.

Indeed, women in their 20s are the brand’s fastest-growing segment, and this number has more than doubled in the past year.

Those aged between 25 and 34 make up 36% of the women using the brand, Hale says, with a further 23% aged between 35 and 44.

Hale explains that part of this is due to the ring-form factor, with women enjoying the jewelry element of the wearables.

But he continued: “The other factor of course is a generalized movement away from patriarchy, in many forms, in medicine. Whether it’s the gas lighting of someone who’s going through something and they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, it’ll be fine, just relax your stress’ or doctors overprescribing birth control because they’re worried that you’re not going to take it regularly.

“There’s all these sort of things where women are saying ‘You know what? My body, my choice. I will own my health experience and I’ll do it independent of the patriarchy.’ Oura, weirdly, has become an emblem of that.”

While Hale wants to make it simple for women to delete their data from the Oura platform, he questioned whether this is a reaction to a political rhetoric as opposed to a true threat.

Moreover, location data may present more of an evidentiary concern than period information, he added, saying data deletion should be “pretty sufficient” to reassure users.

“I don’t know of any cases where anyone’s biometric data is being contested or being used against [people],” Hale added. “It’s probably more a statement about the political atmosphere. That being said, it’s important to make that risk zero if we can.”

Of course, Hale and Oura’s data privacy code isn’t just for people who want to keep their cycle information to themselves.

“As a health company our job is to service you in the name of your health,” Hale said. “We are not there to serve insurers, we are not there to serve advertisers. We are not there to serve our own ecosystem because we don’t have an ecosystem.

“Our purpose solely is your health. I think the reality is that the only way you can measure that is trust, and the trust comes because we get it right more often than most wearables. We get it right in such a way that you’re like, ‘I think I can trust this thing’ and that’s really powerful.”