Meta and Flo's Betrayal Shows Us: Women’s Bodies Are Still Up for Sale in 2025

Meta just got caught. A jury ruled in early August 2025 that the company had accessed sensitive reproductive health data from the Flo Health app without women’s consent.

On paper, it sounds like another tech privacy scandal. But for women, it’s much more. It’s a betrayal at the most intimate level. It’s proof that our private lives - our bodies - are being commodified, surveilled, and exploited.

Flo isn't just another app.

It is marketed as a safe space, a kind of digital health diary where women can track periods, pregnancies, sex lives, moods, and birth control choices. It makes promises that speak directly to women’s vulnerability: “trust us, your information is safe.”

And millions believed it. By 2020, over 150 million people worldwide were using it.

But between 2016 and 2019, Flo shared intimate data with Facebook, Google, and marketing companies - without consent. Every time a woman opened the app, every log of a cycle, every note about sex or pregnancy: tracked and sold. Flo not only broke trust - it gave third parties the freedom to use this data however they wanted.

This wasn’t a harmless “oops.” This was a choice. A deliberate betrayal - and the betrayal is staggering.

We’re not talking about shopping preferences or workout routines. We’re talking about the most personal, vulnerable details of reproductive health. And it matters now more than ever, because women’s reproductive health is under siege.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, women’s digital lives have become potential evidence trails. In Nebraska, Meta already handed over private Facebook messages between a mother and daughter planning to obtain abortion pills - messages later used to prosecute them.

If police can demand your private messages, what’s stopping them from demanding your menstrual logs? Imagine a world where a missed period on an app becomes a red flag to law enforcement. That world is not hypothetical - it’s right here, right now. Big brother is watching you. Literally.

This is the reality women face: technology that promised empowerment has been weaponised. Period trackers, pregnancy apps, online pharmacies - all of them can become traps.

The instinctive reaction might be: just don’t use these apps. But is that really a solution? Technology has become embedded in how women manage their health. Apps like Flo were popular because they offered convenience, empowerment, and a sense of control. Now women are being asked to choose between empowerment and privacy, between using modern tools and protecting themselves from potential harm.

A recent ProPublica investigation showed online pharmacies selling abortion pills were sharing sensitive data with Google and others. Your searches, your clicks, your purchases - handed over to corporations that may, under pressure, hand them over again to the state.

And yet, women are constantly told: Use technology. It’s convenient. It will help you take control of your health. That’s the cruel irony. The very tools designed to give women agency now put them at risk of losing it.

Here’s what makes it worse: men don’t live under this kind of surveillance.

Men aren’t told to second-guess whether a fitness app or a prescription website could one day be used against them in court.

Men don’t have to consider whether logging the most natural biological functions of their bodies could make them criminal suspects. This isn’t just a privacy issue - it’s a gendered issue. The costs of surveillance fall disproportionately, relentlessly, on women.

So what does this mean for women? It means trust is broken. It means women must weigh every digital decision with fear. It means they’re asked to choose between health management and self-protection, between the promise of convenience and the threat of prosecution.

It means that in 2025, women’s bodies are still not fully their own - because their data, the digital reflection of those bodies, is being sold to the highest bidder.

The ruling against Meta is significant. It proves that women’s outrage can pierce through corporate shields, that there can be consequences for betrayal. But let’s not be fooled into thinking one courtroom decision fixes the systemic rot.

Until women’s health data is treated as sacred - not as a commodity for marketers, not as evidence for prosecutors - women will continue to live in a digital minefield.

This is about freedom.

The freedom to track your health without fear.

The freedom to seek care without surveillance. The freedom to know that your body isn’t being sold as data points. And until that freedom is secured, women will keep paying the price - in trust, in safety, and in autonomy.