Legal and Ethical Challenges of Femtech: Protecting Women's Data & Rights in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

This paper explores the potential legal and ethical challenges of safeguarding women in the European Union under the context of a rising Femtech industry, focusing on emerging rights violations related to data collection on menstruation and period track applications. Historically, data concerning women's fertility and reproductive decisions was stored individually and locally, with legal protections against disclosure. However, with the advent of Femtech, women worldwide now freely provide this information to tech companies operating globally, potentially yielding unprecedented power to companies, third parties or governments over the health and reproductive behavior of women. As such, Femtech represents a paradigmatic relationship between data/algorithm based applications and citizen rights, health care, and social inequalities, marking a new era of biopolitical management and surveillance. Despite this, social and political sciences, as well as ethical and legal frameworks, do not sufficiently address the complexity of these issues. Based upon a scoping literature review, our contribution will summarize the main trends and challenges from a legal and ethical point of view. We content that effective policy in this area will have to bringing up a more gender sensitive impact on women's data protection regulation under the Femtech industry context.