Blog Posts

Femtech: Knowledge Repository

Our systems and user studies and regulations reviews include:

1. Bluetooth Security Analysis of General and Intimate IoT devices and Apps (Sept 2024)

A paper was published in the International Journal of Information Security that analysed the Bluetooth connection between FemTech IoT devices and mobile apps. The results highlighted serious vulnerabilities, including unencrypted Bluetooth traffic, insecure authentication, and undocumented services. This paper was covered in the online news. For an accessible version of the paper, read our blogpost here.

2. Mind the FemTech Gap: Regulation Failings and Exploitative Systems (Mar 2024)

A paper was published in the Frontiers Journal in IoT that studied the FemTech ecosystem.  An initial version of this paper was published in PEP (SOUPS workshop). This study revealed exploitative patterns due to inadequate regulations and enforcement. We specifically reviewed the existing regulations related to FemTech in the UK, EU, and Switzerland and identify the gaps. We run experiments on a range of FemTech devices and apps and identify several exploitative practices. We advocate for the policymakers to explicitly acknowledge and accommodate the risks of these technologies in the relevant regulations. We also published a blog post which was of interest of some national and international news too. Read the blogpost here.

3. User Risk Perceptions and Protective Actions (May & Oct 2023)

A paper was published at EuroUSEC that explored users’ understanding of the security and privacy of FemTech. A follow up paper was published at IFIP INTERACT focusing on intimate digital health contexts. These studies use a combination of HCI methods including interviews, surveys, and Story Completion Method (SCM) and reveal that while users can speculate the range of harms and risks, they are not equipped with the skills to protect themselves. Video presentations are provided here and here.

4. Paper and Poster Presentation at the UK Fertility Conference (Jan 2024)

Apart from papers in Cybersecurity and Privacy conferences and journals, we also engaged with flagship conferences in other disciplines. For instance, we published and presented our work in 2024 closely related to our previous paper), and then a poster in 2025 at the UK Fertility Conference. These works highlight that there is an abundance of digital sexual and reproductive health technologies that presents a concern regarding their potential sensitive data breaches. We analysed Internet of Things (IoT) devices with sexual and reproductive tracking services and found this ever-extending collection of data implicates many beyond the individual including partner, child, and family. Results suggest that digital sexual and reproductive health data privacy is both an individual and collective endeavour.

5. Challenges of Extracting Data from Social Media: The Case of Women’s Health Misinformation (Sept 2023)

Gathering data from social media platforms has become an essential task for understanding various cybersecurity and privacy trends, behaviours, and patterns on the internet, for instance, misinformation. However, when it comes to sensitive and intimate topics such as women’s health and misinformation, researchers face a multitude of challenges in extracting relevant data from popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

In two blog posts, we explored the difficulties researchers encounter on misinformation on women’s health and the limitations imposed by the social media giants (Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit) when it comes to data collection, which hinder their efforts to acquire valuable data. For the full blog post, please visit this link and this link.