SCIEL Seminar: Femtech, Intimate Data and Privacy (Online)

Speakers:

Dr Luana Mathias Souto, Open University of Catalunya (UOC), Spain

Maria Vittoria Malinconi, PhD Candidate in Comparative Public Law, University of Florence, Italy

Chair:

Dr Maria Tzanou, University of Sheffield

About the Event

In her presentation, based on results from two phases of the THELMA project, Dr. Luana Mathias Souto will examine important debates surrounding Femtech applications, focusing on user perception. The analysis is based on empirical evidence from 21 user interviews conducted in Spain and an analysis of user reviews in English on 20 Femtech applications available on the Google Play Store. The results indicate that even well-informed individuals may underestimate how much Femtech applications shape daily practices and expose users to potential data vulnerabilities, highlighting the need to strengthen user awareness and critical engagement.

Maria Vittoria Malinconi will discuss the need for regulation designed to proactively hold all actors involved in femtech accountable, from app providers to data controllers and, to some extent, the women themselves. She argues that only the informed awareness of female users can ensure the exercise of the right to intimate privacy in its fundamental dimension of informational self-determination.

About the Speakers

Luana Mathias Souto is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the Gender and ICT Research Group from the Open University of Catalunya - UOC (Spain). Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar linked to the School of Law at the University of Sheffield. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Law from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais – PUC Minas (Brazil). She is the Principal Investigator of the THELMA project (Reproductive Health under Algorithm Surveillance), funded by the European Commission.

Maria Vittoria Malinconi is a PhD candidate in comparative public law at the University of Florence. Her doctoral research examines cybersecurity from a comparative constitutional law perspective. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research interests focus on the constitutional implications of cybersecurity and AI from a comparative perspective, with particular attention to FemTech, deepfakes, disinformation, and cognitive warfare.