When Ovia Fertility — one of the most popular women's health apps in the US — was exposed for selling user data to employers, it caused a wave of well-deserved alarm. The app was marketed as a private space for tracking fertility and pregnancy. In practice, it was also a data source for companies who wanted insight into their female employees' reproductive intentions.
This is not an isolated story. It's a pattern. And it's worth understanding before you start putting your family's most intimate moments into any parenting app.
The Free App Business Model
Most parenting apps are free, or have a free tier that most users never upgrade from. They're not free because the company is a charity. They're free because the company has a different revenue model than the one you're thinking about.
There are a few variants of this model:
- Direct advertising — your data is used to serve you targeted ads, which are sold to baby product brands who want to reach new parents. Your data about feeding times, diaper counts, and sleep patterns tells advertisers exactly where you are in the new-parent journey.
- Data brokering — your anonymized (but often re-identifiable) health data is sold to third parties including insurers, employers, pharmaceutical companies, and data brokers.
- Employer/insurer partnerships — some apps (Ovia being the most notorious example) are offered as free corporate benefits. The company pays for access; you provide the data.
- Future monetization — the app is free now, but user data is an asset that can be monetized later, whether through sale, advertising, or a pivot in business model.
None of these models are necessarily illegal. All of them involve your family's private information becoming someone else's commercial resource.
What Data Is Actually at Stake
Baby apps collect a striking amount of sensitive information. Consider what a comprehensive parenting app knows about you:
- Your baby's feeding patterns, growth, and health metrics
- Your sleep patterns and level of deprivation
- Your location (via GPS tagging of entries and walks)
- Your mental state (via journal entries describing anxiety, depression, relationship strain)
- Your relationship dynamics (who does which caregiving tasks)
- Your child's developmental trajectory, including early signs of delays
In isolation, any of these is moderately sensitive. Together, they constitute an extraordinarily detailed profile of your family's private life — one that you're generating daily, in moments of exhaustion and openness, without necessarily thinking about who might be reading it.
Early Days' Model: You Pay, We Protect
Early Days charges money. The free tier has limited features; the Premium tier costs $99 as a one-time lifetime purchase. This is not a coincidence — it's the business model, intentionally chosen because it eliminates the pressure to monetize user data.
When your payment is our revenue, we have no incentive to sell your data. In fact, we have the opposite incentive: our reputation and our business depend on your trust, which means protecting your privacy is a commercial imperative as well as an ethical one.
Here's what this means in practice:
- No advertising. Early Days contains no ads, no ad targeting, and no advertising-related data collection.
- No data selling. We do not sell, license, or share your data with third parties for commercial purposes.
- No employer integrations. Early Days is not offered as a corporate benefit or wellness program. No employer has access to your journal.
- No data brokering. Your anonymized data is not sold to data brokers, health companies, or insurers.
Encryption and Technical Security
Privacy commitments mean nothing without the technical implementation to back them up. Here's what Early Days does at the technical level:
- Encryption at rest: Your journal entries, photos, and voice notes are encrypted when stored on our servers. The encryption keys are managed such that your data is not readable by unauthorized parties even in the event of a server breach.
- Encryption in transit: All data transmitted between your device and our servers uses TLS encryption. There is no unencrypted channel through which your data travels.
- Secure infrastructure: Early Days runs on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure (Supabase/PostgreSQL) with industry-standard security practices, including regular security audits.
What About the AI Summaries?
This is a reasonable question. When Early Days generates your weekly AI summary, it sends your journal entries to Claude's API (Anthropic). We're aware that this involves your data leaving our servers, and we've been deliberate about it.
Here's how it works: your entries are sent to Anthropic's API solely for the purpose of generating your summary. They are processed and the summary is returned. Anthropic's enterprise API agreements specify that data sent via the API is not used to train AI models. Your entries are not retained by Anthropic beyond the duration of the API call.
If you prefer not to use AI summaries, you can disable them in Settings. Your journal remains fully functional without them.
Data Export and Portability
Your data is yours, not ours. Early Days supports full data export in JSON and CSV formats from Settings → Export. You can download your entire journal archive at any time, including all entries, milestones, and associated metadata.
If you ever decide to leave Early Days, you leave with everything. We don't hold your memories hostage behind a subscription.
A Word About "Anonymized" Data
Apps that sell "anonymized" user data often present this as a privacy-neutral practice. It's worth knowing that data anonymization is far less protective than it sounds. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that individuals can be re-identified from "anonymized" datasets — especially health data — with surprising accuracy. A dataset that knows your baby's birth month, your approximate location, your baby's feeding patterns, and several developmental milestones is not as anonymous as it might appear.
Early Days does not sell anonymized data. This is not a loophole we're willing to use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Early Days share any data with third parties?
Early Days shares data with Anthropic's API for the purpose of generating AI summaries (opt-in, can be disabled). We use Supabase for database infrastructure and standard cloud providers for hosting. We do not share data with advertisers, data brokers, employers, insurers, or any commercial third parties.
Is Early Days GDPR compliant?
Yes. Early Days is designed for GDPR compliance, including the right to data export, the right to deletion, and clear documentation of what data is collected and why. Users in the EU and UK can request full data deletion at any time.
Can I use Early Days without enabling AI summaries?
Yes. AI summaries can be disabled in Settings. All other Early Days features — guided prompts, voice journaling, partner sharing, milestone tracking, postcards — function without AI summaries enabled. Disabling summaries means no journal data is ever sent to Anthropic's API.
How do I delete my Early Days account and data?
You can request full account and data deletion from Settings → Account → Delete Account. Deletion is permanent and comprehensive: all journal entries, photos, voice notes, and account information are removed from our systems within 30 days.
Is Early Days open-source?
Early Days is not currently open-source. Our security practices and privacy commitments are documented in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, which we encourage you to read before starting a journal.
