Illustration by Marta Pucci
Why data will revolutionize global female health
When tracking your cycle, you’re not only helping yourself, you’re also helping other people and scientific research.
Data provides a historic opportunity to advance research for global female health. Female health and reproductive health are vastly under-served and under-researched. We at Clue want to help fill this gap.
We work closely with respected universities and scientists to improve female health and to find insights that benefit our users. The more reproductive health data scientific researchers have access to, the better they will be able to conduct targeted research that might someday lead to significant improvements in female health.
Clue’s users are part of a global movement. When tracking your cycle, you’re not only helping yourself, you’re also helping other people and scientific research.
We believe in being honest and transparent about what Clue does with data. Depending on the privacy preferences you set for your Clue account, we may use and/or share some of your de-identified health data for academic and clinical research, either internally and/or with universities and companies. We only work on research projects that benefit female health and well-being. We are not selling your personal user data to anyone, and we never will.
Introduction
It’s private. It’s intimate. It’s your life expressed in numbers. It’s your health data. And it can create a healthcare revolution. I believe we need to seize on health data’s fantastic potential to help us understand our bodies and our lives, and revolutionize female health globally.
Like many people, I often connect data — and big data in particular — to fears about surveillance, security breaches and corporate profits. What about my privacy? Will my every move be monitored and controlled? Will others have access to very personal information? Will I be refused service because people have access to my private information? Will I be defined as nothing more than a statistical probability? The list is daunting.
Yet here I am, CEO of a company where our users trust us with their most intimate data. Why? Because the opportunity to advance healthcare is massive: for the individual, for science and for humankind. There is the incredible potential when an individual person can not only track their personal health patterns, but also see how they compare and correlate with millions of other people doing the same. It’s a global movement to revolutionize female health, powered by data.
I feel deeply that we owe it to the Clue community — our users, our investors and our team — to be responsible and transparent about what data we collect and why, and what we do to protect our users’ privacy.
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1. We’re using data to advance research for global female health.
Right now, we are working with scientists at Stanford University, Columbia University, the University of Washington and the University of Oxford on research projects that we hope will improve the lives of people all over the world. We can only make those advances with data.
On numbers alone, mobile health tracking enables us to generate data on a scale that skyrockets past existing medical research. We can paint pictures that no one could have even dreamt of, simply by looking at an individual’s data.
For example, the two largest long-term studies currently cited in research tracked between 650 and 2,700 women over a period of decades (or between 30,000 and 275,000 menstrual cycles).
In contrast to that, millions of Clue users enter data every single month.
That means a vast quantity of information that we can analyze and interpret based on the experiences of not just a handful of people from one place, but millions of Clue users. Our users are from over 180 countries, from teens to over 60 years old, from menarche to pregnancy to menopause, with regular and irregular cycles and every possible health condition from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) to endometriosis and beyond.
This is a truly global collection of data about the menstrual cycle, and to our knowledge, it’s the first of its kind. Cycle tracking is not only transforming research on female health, but is directly improving the lives of Clue’s present and future users. This information informs Clue’s community of users about the importance of the menstrual cycle as a vital sign; updates information about the menstrual cycle, informing the global averages; and serves as a resource for further research.
What does this look like when you apply it in the real world?
More accurate predictions
We’re able to provide a better service and experience for our users, so they have a more accurate understanding of their own cycles. We have already updated the app’s period predictions based on user data to provide more accurate cycle statistics.
Smart health correlations
The app will change your individual predictions based on data from similar people of your age, cycle length and symptom pattern.
Faster and more efficient research
Female health and reproductive health are vastly under-served and under-researched. We at Clue want to help fill this gap. The more reproductive health data universities have access to, the better they will be able to conduct targeted research that might someday lead to significant improvements in female health. As I previously said, we’re collaborating with major research institutions (like Columbia, Stanford and Oxford). Some examples of what these sorts of studies will address are the differences in bleeding patterns with respect to age (from adolescence to menopause), and how birth control and lifestyle choice impact these patterns. Another focus is on how different diseases affect the menstrual cycle. Those studies are currently running and we will of course share the findings with everyone once they’re published.
Not only are the top universities using Clue to conduct studies, but we also plan to use our massive data set for future research done by our own team of data scientists and biologists to improve your personal predictions, and make it easier for you to identify health insights and patterns of symptoms related to your cycle (which you will, always, have the option to opt out of, as I’ll explain more below).
2. Your data is your own.
Earning your trust is the foundation of all our work.
Our plans for earning money do not involve selling users’ personal data, especially their sensitive health data. We never have, and we never will.
Clue’s plans to earn money will be a business model that will make sense to you, and will be based on delivering value to Clue’s community of users. It takes time to get that right, and that is why we have raised money from investors to keep us going. We will need your help to figure out what we can build that you really want.
We carefully evaluate potential research partnerships to ensure that Clue’s users and the overall field of female health directly benefit from the findings. We will co-publish results, making them available to Clue users. You provided the data, and you should get insights from science back.
You can also get a copy of your complete data set at any time (here is how).
3. You have a choice about how your data is used.
I believe that pseudonymous data can help us uncover new insights on a global scale, but you should also have the right to choose how your Clue data is processed. It’s your data and your decision.
That’s why you have granular control over what types of data you wish to share with Clue. When you first create a Clue account, you can set your privacy settings to how you’d like them.
Here’s a brief overview of our data processing:
“Core” data processing is required for us to provide our service to you. It’s needed for things like creating your Clue account, technically ensuring the stability of the app’s platform so it doesn’t crash, and most importantly processing your health data to give you period predictions and cycle insights. So if you’d like to use the Clue app, you need to 1) accept our Terms of Service 2) acknowledge that you have read our Privacy Policy, and 3) consent to us processing your health data. You will be asked these three things during onboarding, when you first set up Clue.
“Optional” data processing is when we process types of data which help us advance scientific research, improve the Clue app with new features, and grow the Clue community with better advertising. This data processing is all optional, and you can select which types you agree to in your privacy settings. When it comes to the technical improvement of our app, we do not ask for your consent, because we do that based on our legitimate interest, but you can opt out of this processing any time. In total, there are five types of optional data processing.
I welcome you to read our full Privacy Policy for more details about how your data is used, as well as our security and privacy practices. Please get in touch if it's ever unclear how your data is used.
4. Your data is safe.
Because earning your trust is the foundation of all our work, keeping that trust is essential to our business.
We work hard to keep your data secure and strive to be better than industry standards.
Here are the safety guarantees that we offer:
When you create your Clue account, your personal data is stored separately from your health data and service settings. Doing this means your health data has an even higher level of protection.
When you create your Clue password, it’s stored using one-way encryption with both “hashing” and “salting” techniques. This means your password is combined with a random string of characters and then scrambled up so it's unreadable. Not even Clue staff have access to your password. Doing this ensures extra protection for your password.
When your data is sent between your device and our Clue servers, we use hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS). This is a type of encrypted data transmission, which scrambles the information being sent so it’s unreadable. Doing this increases the security of your data transfer.
When you subscribe to Clue Plus, all your payment information is securely processed by the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, or by Paddle if you sign up via our website. Clue does not store your payment information at any time.
Conclusion
Hopefully it’s clear why I believe data can transform the future of healthcare. When I think of the long term vision for Clue, I see so much more we can do, both in the developed world and in developing countries. Health data can be used to make it easier for doctors to diagnose medical conditions like PCOS, endometriosis or fertility problems. And there is a possibility to develop non-invasive, non-hormonal forms of birth control for millions — if not billions — of people around the world.
We are committed to making it happen. Every single data point you enter and share empowers you to be in charge of your health and moves us all closer to that global revolution in female health.
If you have any questions or feedback, I would love to talk to you more about this. It’s important to me. Ask me or comment anytime on Twitter or send us your questions.
Clue helps you understand your cycle so you can discover how to live a full and healthy life. #NowYouKnow
Article updated on March 11, 2021.
