Your Period Tracker Is (Probably) Spying on You

Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app stores that are almost exclusively used to target women and girls.

Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, company executives have made opaque and conflicting comments about whether the feature even exists. We took a step back to lay out both the claims and the facts about the very real system.

In a speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump continued to push unsubstantiated and thoroughly debunked claims about interference in the 2020 US election. He even promised massive revelations in a trove of documents posted to the White House website, but the files did not prove his assertions—and in some cases actually contradicted Trump’s claims.

As adoption of AI tools rapidly expands and their capabilities increase, the tech giant Anthropic continued a push to get US states to regulate AI . Speaking about AI transparency requirements in California and New York from last year, Anthropic’s head of US state and local government relations, Cesar Fernandez, told WIRED this week, “The transparency-focused safety bills of 2025 were a really important start, but as the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance quickly—the policy responses need to match.”

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The astrology-themed period tracker Stardust sends users’ reproductive health details—birth control type, pregnancy status, moods, and symptoms as specific as tender breasts and stomach cramps—to a data firm not named in its privacy policy, according to the BBC , which first reported a Mozilla Foundation audit of six popular trackers produced in partnership with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center.

Stardust scored 2 out of 10 , the worst of the group. Mozilla researcher Shoshana Wodinsky found the app pings third-party trackers from the moment it opens, before a user enters anything; the instant she logged a symptom, the details went to analytics firm RudderStack alongside a persistent user ID, with no in-app way to shut the sharing off. RudderStack is built to route data onward to destinations Mozilla couldn't observe. Stardust also hands Facebook an ad identifier that ties in-app behavior to the platform's existing profiles. The company told TechCrunch it has never received a legal demand for user data.