17 Aug But even before that, Levy argued, the “data-fication” of romantic and sexual behaviors was everywhere
There are strong assumptions built into their design that can marginalize a lot of women's sexual health experiences,” Karen Levy, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University, tells me in an email, after explaining that her period tracker couldn't understand her pregnancy, “a several-hundred-day menstrual cycle
“Yeah, sure, [Apple] added period tracking, but you see some holdover effects of that,” she says. “You still have to use a lot of third-party apps to track women's health.”
There have been free period-tracking apps ever since there have been apps, but they didn't really boom until the rise of Glow - founded by PayPal's Max Levchin and four other men - in 2013, which raised $23 million in venture funding in its first year, and made it clear that the menstrual cycle was a big business opportunity.
There were sex-tracking apps that quantified performance by counting thrusts and duration and “noise
By 2016, there were so many choices, surrounded by so little coherent information and virtually zero regulation, that researchers at Columbia University Medical Center buckled down to investigate the entire field.