‘Babies are a massive money spinner’: Data,reproductive labour and the commodification of pre-motherhood in fertility and pregnancy apps

Abstract

This article investigates how users of self-tracking apps evaluate the imperative to share intimate data. Through 42 interviews with 24 women in the United Kingdom who had used fertility and pregnancy tracking apps with the hope of giving birth to a baby in the future, this article empirically examines the lived experiences of sharing, withholding and managing intimate data. Research participants perceived their sharing of data with their apps as a transaction or payment in return for improved access to knowledge and information about fertility, pregnancy and parenthood. By critically examining the intersection of digitised reproductive labour and intensive mothering ideologies, I argue that these evaluations of data sharing as transactional were heavily influenced by a digitally intensified consumer culture of pre-motherhood.

Introduction

There are hundreds of smartphone apps that focus on the reproductive and parenting journey, with many popular apps claiming over 100 million downloads worldwide. This article focuses on what are commonly known as fertility and pregnancy tracking apps and how these were used by women while they were trying to conceive or pregnant. Fertility apps offer a tool for tracking bodily signs of fertility across the menstrual cycle. Based on past cycle data, the app predicts future menstruation and ovulation dates, which can be used to help prevent or facilitate conception. Here, I am specifically concerned with the use of these apps by women who wanted to aid conception and become pregnant, yet it is important to note that many of the same apps can be used for tracking menstrual cycles by people with no pregnancy intentions. Pregnancy apps allow users to access information to match each stage of their pregnancy, usually through weekly updates about foetal development and changes to the pregnant body. All fertility and pregnancy apps are commodities due to being part of an online market-based system where there is an imperative to compete for users’ attention and engagement. While many apps are free to download and use, free apps are likely to create value through other means, such as targeted in-app advertising or selling user data to third parties, which both create value from the app user and their data (Kemp, 2023).

Fertility and pregnancy apps invite, and often require, the user to enter a range of data into the app, including their name, email address and birthdate as well as more intimate data specific to the user’s body, reproductive and general health, medical history and sexual practices. Data entry options can be extensive and some apps have been found to collect information that is beyond what is functionally needed through the guise of optional profile data or user surveys (Shipp and Blasco, 2020). Significant concerns have been raised regarding the security of data held by some fertility and pregnancy apps (Alaattinoğlu, 2022; Levy, 2015) and analyses of apps’ privacy statements have confirmed that many have lacking data protection capabilities (Alfawzan et al., 2022). Data security concerns peaked in public debates following the 2022 overturning of Roe versus Wade in the United States (Garamvolgyi, 2022; Torchinsky, 2022), which prompted closer consideration of how intimate data – and especially data that infers the beginning or ending of pregnancy – may be used as evidence of an abortion having taken place (Shipp and Blasco, 2020). In the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner’s Office (2023) has launched an investigation of period and fertility tracking apps’ data-sharing practices following reports from app users about data security issues.

Empirical research has shown how these apps have subtly become integrated into the intimate routines and practices of reproductive life (Hamper, 2022; Grenfell et al., 2021) and intensified the physical and emotional labour that women engage in during pregnancy (Johnson, 2014; Thomas and Lupton, 2016). Less is known, however, about women’s own reflections on disclosing intimate data through fertility and pregnancy apps. In a study from New Zealand, Hohmann-Marriott (2023) explored users’ views on sharing data with period tracking apps and found that many viewed their menstrual cycle data as ‘uninteresting and unproblematic’ (p. 3036). While similar narratives emerged in the study presented here, this article shows how participants largely did perceive their personal data as valuable to app developers, even if they were unsure of the precise dynamics through which value was generated. Drawing on 42 interviews with 24 women who were trying to conceive, pregnant or new mothers, this article focuses on how participants articulated their willingness to share data with their apps and the perceived consequences of doing so. Interview conversations presented elements of a privacy paradox where ‘people appear to want and value privacy, yet simultaneously appear not to value or want it’ (Nissenbaum, 2009: 104). I examine this paradox by attending to a particular social and cultural context of app use (Shklovski et al., 2014) and the ‘mixed feelings’ expressed by participants about sharing intimate data (Hohmann-Marriott, 2023; Park et al., 2023). Focusing on everyday digital practices and interactions with technology elucidates the complex and dynamic nature of privacy evaluations (Burgess et al., 2022).

I argue that fertility and pregnancy app users’ considerations about data must be understood in relation to the dual intensification of digitised reproductive labour and consumer cultures of pre-motherhood. In particular, participants perceived a connection between their app use and an increased engagement with advertisements relating to reproduction and family life. As such, this article extends scholarship on the lived experiences of intimate data in new media and responds to calls for research into ‘the possibilities of user-agency in digital consumption contexts’ (Takhar and Pemberton, 2019). Considering women who engaged with fertility and pregnancy apps with a strong desire to give birth to a baby in the future presents a prime opportunity to investigate the relationships between self-monitoring, intimate data sharing and pre-motherhood consumption practices.

Data, labour and the commodification of pre-motherhood

Practices of ovulation and pregnancy monitoring with an app are central to the digitisation—and intensification—of reproductive work for women (Hamper, 2020; Johnson, 2014), constituting a new era of reproductive technologies and services that Franklin (2022) has named iFertility. Drawing digital self-tracking practices into conversation with conceptualisations of biolabour, Foster (2012) considers how women who engage with new technologies are encouraged to share information, knowledge and data for the benefit of someone else, such as a company or patent owner. Following this argument, the voluntary data collection and sharing associated with fertility and pregnancy tracking constitute a form of biolabour, where women’s use of apps is imbricated in a web of value and knowledge about female bodies. Revenue is created from the free labour that users put into self-tracking apps (Alaattinoğlu, 2022), often without any form of meaningful consent from the user (Gilman, 2021).

For many fertility and pregnancy app developers, the value of personal data comes in large part from the targeting of advertisements to app users both within the app and in associated email lists or websites (Claesson and Bjørstad, 2020; Kemp, 2023). These apps offer a direct channel to people who are either planning a pregnancy or pregnant, which constitute highly commodified consumer groups (Vertesi, 2014). For example, sharing pregnancy intention with a fertility app facilitates the targeted advertisement of ovulation and pregnancy tests towards a likely consumer of these products. Similarly, sharing a pregnant person’s estimated date of delivery (also known as the ‘due date’) with a pregnancy app enables the targeting of advertisements to each stage of pregnancy. The plethora of loyalty programmes designed for pregnant people offers compelling evidence of the long-standing commercial value of pregnancy as a window for establishing brand relationships (Freidenfelds, 2020).

The consumption of products, services, information and advice has become central to contemporary practices of reproduction in Europe and North America (Thomson et al., 2011). Preparing for and ‘having’ a baby is not simply a biological process of conception, pregnancy and childbirth but also a social transformation that involves a contemporary material culture of mother/infant relations (Clarke, 2004; Tiidenberg and Baym, 2017). Part of this transformation involves shopping, where researching, acquiring, giving and receiving products is an important ‘performative arena’ through which women anticipate motherhood and start viewing themselves as mothers (Taylor 2008: 126). Extending this point, Miller (2004) suggests that ‘consumption is more often an expression of relationships than of some mindless materialism’ (p. 36). Following Miller, shopping can be both a routine and also deeply meaningful act through which love for others is expressed and reproduced. In situations of pregnancy loss, purchasing baby items can offer a way for intended parents to establish the realness of both their baby and their identity as parents (Layne, 2004). The point is that shopping for expected or hoped-for babies can be powerful.

As Hays’ (1996) conceptualisation of intensive mothering reminds us, shopping is only one part of the vast ‘physical, moral, mental, and emotional energy’ (p. 4) that is expected of mothers. Intensive mothering is ‘child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive’ (Hays, 1996: 8) and it relies on mothers having the primary responsibility for children. Others have noted how this intensive mothering ideology has been extended to encompass the pregnancy and pre-conception stages, where anyone with the possibility of becoming pregnant is expected to protect their reproductive health and bodies for future pregnancy (Waggoner, 2017). Increasingly, potential parents are expected to account for their reproductive decisions, such as planning the timing of their child(ren) and demonstrating a commitment to resourceful parenting, well before actually becoming parents or even becoming pregnant (Faircloth and Gürtin, 2018). Illustrating this point, Myers (2017) has shown how childless women who freeze their eggs draw on intensive mothering ideologies in their reproductive decision-making. In this case, delaying pregnancy is constructed as a responsible choice to better meet the demands of intensive mothering in the future.

For women who monitor their bodies through fertility and pregnancy apps, these forms of digitised reproductive labour intersect with intensive mothering ideologies. Engaging with these apps – both through self-monitoring as well as consuming the advice and information that apps provide – is one way of demonstrating an intensive investment in the prospect of future motherhood. Aligning with intensive mothering ideologies, these apps encourage concerted efforts to become knowledgeable about conception, pregnancy and mothering through informational resources, and they cultivate socially expected emotions, such as excitement, about prospective motherhood (Hamper and Nash, 2021). Of course, as Hays (1996) notes, not all mothers follow expected practices of intensive mothering, but these practices are still ‘implicitly or explicitly understood as the proper approach to the raising of a child’ (p. 9) and they set the ‘normative standard’ of mothering against which all mothers are measured (Arendell, 2000: 1195; also Tiidenberg and Baym, 2017). These normative standards are culturally and geographically specific and thus continuously changing (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2014) as well as inflected by age, ethnicity and social class, where ‘good’ reproduction is not only defined by what a person does but also the socio-spatial positions that they occupy. This article empirically traces the relationships between being a ‘good’ digital citizen who protects their personal data and being a ‘good’ reproductive subject who engages in digitally-mediated practices of surveillance and consumption.

Research methods

The analysis presented in this article draws on 42 semi-structured interviews with 24 women who had used fertility and/or pregnancy tracking apps. Eight participants had used only pregnancy apps, 3 participants had used only fertility apps and 13 participants had used both fertility and pregnancy apps. Attending to both fertility and pregnancy app use was an attempt to engage with shifting modes of embodiment, especially between trying to conceive and pregnancy, while also recognising that these are not always clearly distinct stages of reproductive experience (Browne, 2023; Waggoner, 2017). Participant recruitment methods included online advertisements, recruitment postcards in local cafés and community notice boards and in person at baby groups in east and north London, United Kingdom. The study received institutional ethics approval. Participants were given an information letter and they signed a consent form prior to taking part in the study. Quotes are presented in this article using pseudonyms and any identifying information has been removed.

All participants were invited to take part in two interviews in order to cover a range of topics in-depth and capture experiences of change (Read, 2018), including changing relationships to apps. For example, when a participant was pregnant during the first interview and had given birth by the second interview, there was an opportunity to elicit experiences of pregnancy apps while they were being used and with hindsight. Several times, difficult experiences, such as significant health scares or relationship problems, were completely absent from the first interview and surfaced only during the second interview. For a variety of reasons, it was not possible to arrange a second interview with six of the participants.

Interviews were semi-structured and led by the experiences of the participant. Of particular relevance to this article, it was often challenging to elicit in-depth reflections on data pertaining to fertility and pregnancy tracking. Questions about the privacy protections of their apps generally elicited limited responses from participants and none of them explicitly mentioned reading their apps’ privacy policies, which reflects broader issues of these policies being written in a form that is difficult to understand (Shipp and Blasco, 2020) as well as participants not considering apps as posing a higher risk than the other online activities that they already engaged in (Hohmann-Marriott, 2023; Shklovski et al., 2014). However, there were three lines of questioning that offered more productive entry points to talking about data: the first concerned what kinds of information participants would or would not be willing to enter into their fertility or pregnancy app(s); the second asked what they thought happened with their data once it had been entered into an app and the third asked what might motivate developers or companies to create fertility and pregnancy apps. These questions were possibly more relatable given their focus on lived experience and easier to respond to given their openness to uncertainty and conjecture. Both questions and responses shifted between the terms ‘data’, ‘information’ and ‘details’, which further suggests an ambiguity around what actually constitutes data in fertility and pregnancy tracking (Burgess et al., 2022).

Participants engaged with typically middle-class parenting aspirations, such as the felt imperative to adopt a highly informed approach to family planning and pregnancy, where there is an expectation that women are able to make choices, that they should make the ‘right’ choices and also ‘be able to reflexively explain and account for their choices’ (Faircloth and Gürtin, 2018: 989). Participants can be described as ‘ordinary’ app users (Bakardjieva and Smith, 2001; Bucher, 2017) or ‘everyday self-trackers’ (Didžiokaitė et al., 2017) who did not belong to any formal self-tracking community. They were aged between 23 and 44 – with a mean age of 33 – and they were all women in long-term relationships with male partners. In interviews, participants generally perceived me (the interviewer) as a woman with less reproductive experience than themselves, which frequently prompted them to explain their experiences in greater depth on the assumption that I might not fully understand what they meant. Other times, participants warned me of possibly unwanted details about the bodily realities of trying to conceive, pregnancy and childbirth, which was expressed through their apologies for sharing ‘too much information’. Mild laughter and humour were used in interviews – by me and the participants – to breach potentially awkward topics, like talk about sexual acts and relations (Grønnerød, 2004).

The thematic analysis of interviews followed several overlapping phases: starting with writing reflective notes immediately after interviews; revisiting the interviews through the transcription process; two rounds of coding in NVivo, which started with a descriptive coding process followed by more analytic coding and note-writing; a process of organising coded data into themes and tracing the relationships between themes in both diagrammatic and written form (Crang and Cook, 2007). The analysis involved a recursive process of revisiting data and rearticulating themes and the relationships between them (Marshall and Rossman, 2011). In what follows, I explore the relationships between practices of sharing intimate data, digitised reproductive labour and intensive mothering. First, I offer a brief description of the apps most used by the participant group. Then I show how participants perceived their sharing of personal data as an exchange for a service and explore how participants talked about the implications of sharing data with their apps in relation to targeted advertising.

Findings

Participants’ apps

Far from being universally relevant, fertility and pregnancy apps are products of particular times and places. Through regular updates to app design and content, individual apps are both generative of and responsive to shifts in broader sociocultural ideals of good or healthy reproduction and pre-motherhood, and these ideals are negotiated by app users in the context of their everyday digital practices (Burgess et al., 2022). The women interviewed selectively adopted features of their apps that they found personally valuable, meaningful and interesting (Hamper, 2020; Hamper and Nash, 2021). For example, some participants engaged actively with in-app discussion forums whereas others avoided this feature altogether. Seven participants reported paying for upgraded or ‘premium’ versions of their apps in order to access exclusive content. A further 2 participants purchased apps with specific functions, including a contraction timer app for £0.59 and a pelvic floor exercising app developed by the National Health Service for £2.99.

Participants generally preferred apps that felt familiar as opposed to apps that assumed North American users. Familiarity and difference were signalled through tones of communication, terminologies, spellings and measurement systems, as well as descriptions of healthcare services or references to culturally specific rituals and celebrations. The cultural specificity of apps was particularly evident through participants’ comments about certain apps being ‘really American’ or ‘very Americanised’. For example, two participants described the apps Glow Cycle & Fertility Tracker and What to Expect:

Glow was just a bit more user friendly but I remember it had like really annoying tips of the day and it was very cheesy and American . . . like [adopts a North American accent] ‘light a candle and have a massage’.

I did think half way through there really should be a more English version of this [What to Expect app]. Because they ask different questions, they have different health care, they have different requirements, they deal with things in different ways. I got quite bored of questions about baby shower etiquette and all that sort of stuff, how should I announce the sex of my child.

Participants reported using 10 different fertility or menstruation tracking apps. Some of these apps focused on tracking signs of fertility in the context of trying to conceive, such as FertilityFriend (Tamtris Web Services), Kindara (Kindara Inc.) and Glow Cycle & Fertility Tracker (Glow Inc.). Other participants used more general period tracking apps with a ‘trying to conceive’ setting, such as Period Tracker (GP Apps) and iPeriod (Winkpass Creations). Four participants could not recall the name of the app they used.

With regard to pregnancy apps, while participants reported using 15 different apps, 3 apps were mentioned more frequently across the participant group. My Pregnancy & Baby Today (BabyCentre) was used by 11 participants; BabyBump Pregnancy (Alt12 Apps) ¹ was used by 7 participants; and What To Expect (Everyday Health) was used by 5 participants. The first of these apps, My Pregnancy & Baby Today, is tailored to national user groups and constitutes part of the BabyCentre content network. BabyCentre is an established pregnancy and parenting advice brand that spans across websites, email newsletters and an online community, and it has strong affiliations with other baby brands (Barassi, 2017). In the United Kingdom, knowing about baby brands constitutes an important signifier of social identity and can offer a meaningful way of displaying responsibility, respectability and belonging according to class-specific ideals of motherhood (Banister et al., 2016). Participants frequently mentioned brands that they felt an affiliation to or avoided, which firmly places the findings presented here in a consumption context that is particular to the United Kingdom.

Sharing data as a transaction

Interviews highlighted the complex relationships that participants had to their data. A wide range of data can be held in fertility and pregnancy apps, including names, email addresses, height and weight measurements, bodily symptoms, medication or medical treatment, details about sexual practices and contraceptive methods, photographs, discussion posts, written and audio notes, shopping lists, forum discussion entries, foetal heartbeat recordings, foetal kick counts and more. Participants often struggled to articulate how they felt about their data or they responded in non-descript or conflicted terms. One participant specified how she did share personal information with apps despite not liking to do so, which demonstrates how a desire to engage with these apps often superseded any reservations: ‘I don’t really like to put personal information on there. I do, like I will, but I don’t really like to put personal information, too much personal information onto apps, because I’m not sure what they do with it’.

There was a general understanding that the decision to share data with an app is irreversible, as described by another participant: ‘You do give up a lot of your data to them and there’s no way of taking it back’. A few participants described abandoning an app if they felt it was demanding unnecessary information from them. Others perceived their sharing of data as a transaction, and they would evaluate whether they were gaining any added benefit from sharing further details. Becca, who was 38 and had 2 young children, described how she would often hesitate when an app demanded additional details that seemed unnecessary. Speaking across fertility and pregnancy apps, she envisioned a transaction where personal information was exchanged for an improved user experience of the app in terms of more personalised content:

I guess I couldn’t see how I was going to get any value of putting it in. If it was more obvious up-front why they were asking for the information and how they were then going to personalise the content for me and make it more useful, then I might have been more prepared to. But it just seemed like, why are you asking me this?

For participants who were tracking fertility signs in an app, there was a general understanding that entering more data about their menstrual cycles would enable the app to make more precise and personalised predictions of their fertile days (Hamper, 2020). Participants assumed an exchange of data for improved knowledge about fertility, which followed the logic that fertility monitoring now may give better chances of conceiving in the future (Waggoner, 2017). This kind of self-surveillance is normalised and persuasive through discursive regimes of future risk management, control over personal goals and reproductive responsibility (Lupton, 2014). There was also a strong temporal element to participants’ willingness to share data with fertility apps, where participants might intensify their self-monitoring if they were concerned about how long it was taking them to conceive. Mia, who was 35 and trying to conceive following a miscarriage, explained how she would consider monitoring her basal body temperature in the future: ‘I don’t do the whole temperature charts, I never have, well, if I don’t conceive for a year then maybe I’ll start doing that’.

Sometimes, participants described more direct transactions of data in exchange for material rewards. Jenny, who was 34 and had 1 baby, described intensely disliking the consumerism around babies and how this fed into apps. For this reason, she limited her use of both fertility and pregnancy apps, but she continued to use the Emma’s Diary app because it gave her access to shopping vouchers. Emma’s Diary is an established ‘parenting club’ in the United Kingdom with connections to many well-known retailers. In addition to vouchers, members also receive free sample baby products. As Jenny explained, the access to vouchers through the app outweighed the cost of having her personal information sold to other companies: ‘That Emma’s Diary one, that’s the only one I kept because you get free vouchers and stuff like that. It was alright . . . Because they share your information as well, which is really bad’. Similarly, Kate, who was 34 and had a newborn baby at the first interview, explained how she would be more likely to input information or answer in-app surveys if there was a potential reward such as vouchers or prizes. In this case, entering further details was perceived as a choice:

I think had I downloaded an app that I had to put in a lot of information I would look for another one . . . Unless I can win a competition, then I’ll give loads of details [laughs]! We love a competition.

Many participants described how they were ‘heavily bombarded’ with advertising in apps or sent ‘a barrage’ of advertising emails that they thought were connected to apps that they had registered to. Several participants described these emails as spam, but they accepted that engaging with advertisements was the price to pay for their access to content or services in a free app. This was a view that Fiona, who was 26 and had 1 baby, subscribed to:

I’m sure part of the way they [app companies] make their money is through advertising, so. In-app advertising doesn’t really bother me . . . If it’s just a mobile ad-bar down here or you know, [in] some apps it flashes up and you either click on it or you wait six seconds. It doesn’t bother me if it’s a free app, it’s like, well I didn’t pay to have this service so what can I say.

These examples demonstrate how participants viewed their use of fertility and pregnancy apps as embroiled in three transactional relationships. First, participants envisioned how entering more personal data into an app would enable more personalised app content and thus better knowledge to aid their journey towards parenthood. Second, participants described a transaction of their personal data for access to shopping vouchers, product samples or other material rewards, which could only be accessed through an app. Third, participants explained how accepting targeted advertisements in apps was a payment for access to the information provided in that app. I explore the latter point, participants’ acceptance of advertisements, in the next section.

Apps and advertising

When questioned about what fertility and pregnancy apps do with personal and intimate data, many participants responded with reference to apps offering a channel for highly targeted advertising. This advertising was seen as pervasive: ‘All of the brands do it, so it’s not like one brand is advertising their products. It’s a lot of them’. Interview conversations about sharing data with apps frequently slipped into talk about a broader consumer culture of advertising towards prospective parents. Almost all participants recalled seeing advertising in at least some of the apps they had used, including advertisements for conception and pregnancy vitamins and supplements, maternity wear, infant feeding bottles, bottle sterilisers, formula milk, creams, baby monitors, prams and toys. Some also noted much larger items, such as family-size cars, family holidays and financial loan or insurance services. These advertisements existed in a digital marketing context that spanned multiple reproductive experiences, including pre-conception, pregnancy and parenthood, but they often framed these experiences in terms of preparing for motherhood and a baby in the imagined future.

Alice, who was 36 and had a newborn baby at the first interview, made cautious connections between her sharing of personal information with apps and how this enabled commercial gain through targeted advertising. In response to the question of what motivates the developers of fertility and pregnancy apps, Alice said:

I don’t know what their motivation would be . . . I suppose. I mean maybe they do sell the information, but I don’t really know who would want it. I mean . . . I suppose it’s useful to know that x person is wanting to conceive because then you can target advertising towards them, but . . . I don’t know.

Participants reflected on how apps might offer routes to associated websites or partnered brands, and thus be part of broader imperatives to build consumer trust. Esther, who was 31 and pregnant with her first child, explained how having an app could offer greater legitimacy to other aspects of a brand:

I’m imagining if they get you to sign up to their app then you trust their website, and I’m guessing they make money through advertising or some kind of product promotions or partnerships with other baby brands. I’m guessing that’s how they make their money. Because actually they’re not getting anything out of that I’m using their app . . . I hadn’t thought about that, but it must be advertising.

Similarly, in articulating what might drive the development of pregnancy apps, Jenny emphasised the commercial value of babies:

It’s probably for advertising isn’t it, I’d imagine. They probably develop it and someone like Johnson & Johnson will pay them a lot of money to advertise their products and then they make money through advertisement. And obviously, babies are a massive money spinner.

Some participants expressed how they wanted to believe in the altruistic promises of apps and their potential for democratising knowledge about reproduction, yet they also maintained a sense of distrust in app developers’ true intents. For instance, Chrissy, who was 31 and trying to conceive, first noted how she thought fertility and pregnancy apps had positive intentions: ‘I think in a naive, hopeful way maybe you know, to help bring people together . . . to get people talking and connecting’. Then she moderated this hopeful position with a more ‘cynical’ reflection on the motivations of app developers:

A more cynical person might say advertising, if a lot of these free things are sponsored by baby brands . . . There certainly is a lot of advertising. Yeah. And that’s fine. It’s not often that I’ve been, that I’ve seen an ad and thought I must go out and have that. So to me the advertising aspect is acceptable.

Similarly, Paula, who was 37 and had a newborn baby at the first interview, reflected on her trust in pregnancy apps:

Actually, thinking about it, it is quite worrying, they could be backed by anybody, they could be pushing anything. It was really weird I just trusted everything they said, all the information. Because in my head they were just people wanting to help, wanting to give you . . . but obviously they must be monetising it somehow.

A few participants paid to upgrade from free to premium versions of their app in order to avoid the presence of advertising or they accepted targeted advertising through apps as a consequence of having an online presence more generally. Nina, who was 34 and pregnant with her second child, found the advertising in apps annoying but accepted that this was a consequence of her own actions and choice not to take measures to protect her data:

Does it [advertising] bother me? Yes. But then no one is making me use my phone, or I could use the incognito tabs, I just can’t be arsed, so I kind of don’t care that the advertising gurus know that that’s all linked together and that I’m a 34-year-old who is married, or definitely living with a partner, and with kids. I don’t mind that they know that because that’s just the reality of living in this day and age and using your phone for everything.

Like Nina, many participants had a highly individualised view of data privacy, where they saw themselves as bearing the responsibility for securing their data. A few participants described small acts of resistance to apps, like entering personal details that were slightly inaccurate such as a ‘fake’ birthdate or entering an email address reserved for subscriptions that they suspected might ‘spam’ them with advertising (Barassi, 2017). The connections and flows of data across different online sites were sometimes remarked upon by participants as uncanny and mysterious, and the precise ways in which these sites were connected were largely non-transparent. Participants frequently described theories, or what Bucher (2017) conceptualises as algorithmic imaginaries, to explain how algorithms shaped their engagements with apps. One participant described the connected dynamic of apps and websites with reference to ‘little alarms’ that alert dispersed media about changes in browsing habits or interests. Although it has been shown that most users do not fully understand the mechanisms of online tracking and advertising algorithms, this is not the same as being uncritical adopters of Internet technologies (Shklovski et al., 2014; Van Dijck, 2013). Participants were critically aware of how their interactions with apps were not contained within the app but rather connected to the broader dynamics of targeted advertising.

Apps and shopping

Many participants talked about how they valued advertising for how it enabled them to be educated consumers and make good and economical choices for their families. Shopping for a future baby was presented as an acquired skill and important responsibility (Banister et al., 2016). One participant said how they had read ‘reviews about just pretty much every baby item that you can imagine’. Nina described becoming an ‘extremely savvy’ consumer during pregnancy from researching products and she highlighted the gendered nature of this knowledge:

The fact [is] that the mum is the main shopper in a family and she is extremely savvy. She won’t just buy a purchase, she will always shop around, she will always read the peer reviews. Versus a dad, which is ‘how quickly can I get this job done and does the price seem reasonable’. If it’s a no, you go to website number two and you go on like that. Whereas a mum will be like ‘hmm just check here, here, here, here’ [laughs]. So it’s a very different way [of shopping].

Sometimes, the apps offered a more practical tool for structuring shopping. Ella described the shopping list function of her pregnancy app, which contained a ‘hospital bag checklist’ with suggested items to bring for the birth and a ‘what you need to buy for the baby’ checklist. Ella described how the feeling of managing her shopping through an app contributed to gaining a sense of control during pregnancy:

[The app] was useful both as a ‘oh my god’ I need to buy that, I hadn’t thought about that, but also being able to quickly go ‘okay, we’ve got that, got that, got that’ . . . I love being able to tick boxes off and feeling like I’m organised. And you know, when you’re pregnant and having a baby, particularly first time, everything is so out of control, just being able to like make a list and tick things off, it feels like you are gaining a tiny bit of control.

Discourses of control, predictability and planning shape the sociocultural meanings of pregnancy. Shopping in preparation for birth and parenthood must therefore be considered in relation to other forms of planning and preparedness that are commonly expected prior to parenthood, from planning the timing of pregnancy in relation to other life events (Myers, 2017) to writing a birth plan during pregnancy (Lowe, 2016). Apps extend a historical legacy of consumption in preparation for parenthood (Freidenfelds, 2020), yet they also generate new practices – and dilemmas – of anticipatory maternal responsibility (Waggoner, 2017). Lara, who was 33 and had a young baby, used a fertility app extensively but decided against downloading a pregnancy app because she explained: ‘I was so superstitious’. This feeling of superstition was closely connected to knowing that her own mother had experienced a miscarriage late in pregnancy. Lara’s experience captured a conundrum between the powerful consumer culture of pre-motherhood and a heightened awareness of the possibility of miscarriage or stillbirth (Browne, 2023). She qualified her reservation about using a pregnancy app with reference to practices of shopping during pregnancy:

I was really weird about the whole thing [using a pregnancy app]. I was just terrified that something was going to go wrong. To the extent where I wouldn’t even buy anything for him [the baby], until about two weeks before he was due we finally went and bought him some clothes. I remember putting them in his room, or the spare room, and I wouldn’t get anything out of the packet because I was like, otherwise I’m not going to come back in here.

Lara specified how pregnancy apps and acquired baby items would increase the emotional hurt in case of miscarriage or stillbirth: ‘I think what made me nervous was the thought of having too much evidence, or you know, of what happened’. Articulating this response as being ‘superstitious’ and ‘weird’ firmly positioned her experience of pregnancy as being outside of the expected range of experience. She also positioned her feelings in opposition to her husband’s, who she described as ‘much more rational than me’. For Lara, the acts of buying baby items during pregnancy, inhabiting the baby’s room and following her pregnancy via an app, all created material evidence of a baby. This demonstrates how the realness that may be achieved through shopping in situations of pregnancy or baby loss (Layne, 2004) extends into a digital consumption environment. In cases where people want to curtail the evidence of a pregnancy, foetus or baby, engaging with both fertility and pregnancy apps can generate digital traces of a pregnancy that are difficult to erase (Tapp, 2018).

Conclusion

Apps are complexly entangled with embodied experience, marketplaces and commercial interests in ways that make it impossible to ascertain a singular or universal ‘impact’ of these technologies on everyday life. In interviews, participants frequently shifted between being unconcerned about the data they were sharing with their apps and having very specific concerns about their data sharing, and they were often highly aware of their lack of power to resist or challenge the destiny of their data (Foster, 2012; Shklovski et al., 2014). This suggests that considerations about data are contingent and situation-specific (Nissenbaum, 2009), and participants’ concerns about data privacy were tied to their evaluations of the perceived risks versus necessity or reward of engaging with their apps. Other research supports this finding. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, pregnant users of digital health services expressed feeling less concerned about data privacy due to the necessity of digital methods of communication, combined with the lack of opportunities for face-to-face communication (Lazarevic et al., 2023).

Yet sharing intimate data is not without risks. The data collected through apps are partial and imperfect, which poses ethical issues when algorithms reach misguided conclusions or faulty predictions (Bucher, 2017), such as conjecturing that a user is pregnant or intending to become pregnant when they are not (Freidenfelds, 2020; Tapp, 2018). Analyses of pregnancy apps have found that pregnancy loss and termination are erased or ignored in these apps, reflecting a broader cultural silencing of pregnancies that end without the expected birth of a healthy baby (Andalibi, 2021; Browne, 2023). Fertility and pregnancy apps are embedded in a pre-conception care model that promotes the surveillance of women’s health behaviours and reproductive risk management well before conception occurs (Waggoner, 2017). A consequence of this attention to potential pregnancy is that future children and foetuses become entities that women should emotionally and physically invest in; there is an expectation ‘that pregnancy – and thus children – can be perfected ahead of time’ (Waggoner, 2017: 27). Imaginaries of reproductive perfection are closely tied to social ideologies of intensive motherhood. This article demonstrates how encounters with advertisements – both in apps and other new media – play into such future-oriented, normative ideals of reproduction.

At one level, participants were critical of how their attention to apps and associated advertising fed into a consumerist model of motherhood, yet they broadly accepted that their personal data was being used by app developers to target advertisements. There were three reasons for this acceptance; first, encountering targeted advertising was seen as a payment for an otherwise free-to-use app; second, targeted advertising was seen as a consequence of having an online presence more broadly and third, targeted advertising was acceptable because learning about products and brands is an expected part of what it means to prepare for motherhood. Especially during first-time pregnancies, potential parents, and mothers in particular, are beckoned ‘into an ever-expanding consumer world of specialist goods and niche marketing, providing products for every stage of the maternal experience’ (Thomson et al., 2011:197). When coupled with this intensive consumption context, the sheer quantity and pervasiveness of digital advertising give it a particularly ‘persuasive force’ (Takhar and Pemberton, 2018: 314).

While participants sometimes expressed their dislike of targeted advertising through apps, their general acceptance of this advertising had the effect of normalising commodified models of pre-motherhood rather than destabilising them. Advertisements can enable people to prepare for potential pregnancy and parenting in socially normative ways by facilitating the work of researching, browsing and purchasing products (Barassi, 2017). Participants highlighted the value of opportunities to become an informed consumer who could navigate the complex world of baby items (Banister et al., 2016), and their investment of time into carefully identifying the best quality products often constituted a highly meaningful expression of their desire to be a good parent and make good choices for their family (Clarke, 2004; Miller, 2004). Many participants described trying to choose products that were healthy, such as organic foods or gentle baby skincare products, or make economically or environmentally conscious choices, such as opting for long-lasting or reusable items. Researching baby products was an intensive and far-reaching effort, enabling women to become what Fiona described as ‘extremely savvy’ shoppers; yet for others, like Lara, there was a strong sense that they needed to resist any digital and material evidence of their baby until after a live birth.

Participants’ reflections on their app use showed how they continuously negotiated the imperative to be responsible digital citizens who protected their data, while also wanting to be engaged maternal subjects who anticipated future motherhood through digitally-mediated practices of surveillance, consumption and care. In other words, participants had to negotiate the situated and multiple social norms that govern flows of data (Nissenbaum, 2009) as well as feelings about what was achievable in terms of data protection (Shklovski et al., 2014). Sharing data was perceived as a kind of payment in return for access to knowledge and information about fertility, pregnancy and parenthood. The digital aspect of this is important, where the expanse of advertisements across apps, websites and other media offered both a widening and intensification of opportunities for participants to engage with intensive mothering narratives and become informed consumers ahead of the hoped-for birth of a baby.