Future Directions

FemTech security, privacy, and safety remain important parts of the bigger problem; empowering citizens to improve the quality of their lives by offering them autonomy and agency. This requires a multidisciplinary approach across disciplines including Medical and health, computing and engineering, social sciences, etc.

In addition, multiple information and cyber-security and privacy methods can be applied on FemTech for more secure and privacy-preserving designs including Security and privacy by design, Value sensitive design, and Participatory threat modelling. We are yet to see the application and implementation of such methods in FemTech.

Finally, In AGENCY, we looked at FemTech as a collective set of products aimed at the female body. The nuances of the applications of these products and technologies in different stages of one’s life make their security, privacy, and safety issues different from each other. For instance, while the technologies and services aimed at teenagers during puberty vs fertility and pregnancy products vs menopause can share some forms of online risks and harms, they also significantly differ in other threat types due to their intersectionality with e.g., age. As future work, we would like to invite other researchers to study these systems and users separately, and also together to offer better insight to multiple stakeholders including policymakers and end users.