Issued on June 30, 2022
We have received a higher than usual volume of inquiries concerning our privacy practices due to the recent news in the United State concerning the US Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
We are first and foremost on your side! We are following the situation with extreme attention and will certainly adapt our service to the situation as it develops. Fertility Friend has always held an extremely high standard of privacy and will continue to do so.
You can review our privacy policy at:
https://fertilityfriend.com/ffprivacy.html
The highlights of it are:
We do not share or sell your data with any third-party in an anonymized format or not. No sharing/selling period.
We minimize the personal identifying information that we store, currently basically just your email address.
We do not engage in any tracking of your location for any purpose.
We do not have any advertisers, sponsors or other third-parties able to access your usage or target you.
We have clear policies concerning data retention for logs and other machine data.
Our forum posts and any images posted are all deleted after 90 days. There is no way to track you over the years.
Our funding comes entirely from our members' paid memberships. There is no shady funding scheme.
Deleted data is deleted for good, permanently.
The data is stored on servers located in Canada.
We are a Canadian company and just like you we obviously abide by all laws applicable to us. Your government has the same (maybe less) access to the data on your Fertility Friend account than it has to your emails, social networks posts and private messages, messaging apps and even your smart phone. We believe that we maintain the highest level of privacy while providing the service that you expect from us.
More specifically currently our thoughts on the actual risk for specifically US customers using our service are:
The data on Fertility Friend is of very low interest. We are focused on trying to conceive and all data is entered on a voluntary basis with no automatic collection. All the hypothetical usage you see online about using missing data as a "proof" of abortion is really not serious. You can also easily expunge what you feel could be an issue in your data or omit it if that is a concern. We do not keep any change history or even timestamps on when the data was modified. We have a policy of minimal data collection. We collect only what we need to provide the analysis you expect.
We are a Canadian company where abortion is legal and available. Any data request addressed to us would need to be validated by Canadian courts as far as we know. We are still looking into this to be able to make specific statements.
We have been operating for more than 20 years worldwide, including in countries where abortion is illegal. We have never received a data request of that nature in all that time.
We are seriously considering this issue and are still evaluating the actual risk in our specific case. We are trying to figure out what exactly would be best for our US customers. We will update this page as we find out more.
Restricted Mode:
As part of the changes resulting from this situation we have released Restricted Mode, a way to remove your contact information from your account. This feature creates an extra layer of privacy on top of what we usually do. This feature is already available.
Menstrual Calendar FMC
If you are only interested in a period tracker and are using an iPhone, we recommend that you consider using our App Menstrual Calendar FMC. This app is a period tracker compatible with Fertility Friend (it can import and export data to and from Fertility Friend). The app is fully offline (does not require Internet) and stores its data solely on the device (disable your iCloud backup for this App if you need extra privacy).
Fertility Friend
Protecting your privacy since 1998.
Last Update: Mentioned that the servers are located in Canada.