Flo Health’s Sue Khan grew up observing her mother—a female doctor in 1980s Saudi Arabia—provide healthcare to women who “didn’t know their own bodies,” she says. Nowadays, her own professional life also advances the cause of female reproductive health, only from a different angle. Early this year, the London-based lawyer stepped up to direct data security and privacy initiatives at the world’s most popular menstrual-tracking app. Under Khan’s leadership, the Belarus-founded platform now leads the industry in ensuring its 50 million users maintain control over their most intimate data.
After the US Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion, and reproductive privacy gained global attention, Flo rolled out a first-of-its-kind feature: Anonymous Mode, which allows users to access the app without using their name, email address, or other digital identifiers. Flo’s Anonymous Mode also functions in such a way that no single data source has complete user information, helping to protect against hacking. Under Khan, Flo has taken the feature one step further, open-sourcing the technology so that other femtech companies can use it, too.
As Khan sees it, privacy and security are fundamental aspects of Flo’s product, so she’s not satisfied by merely obeying the letter of privacy law. Instead, she envisions the personal health platform having the same protections and security of a banking app. Reaching this goal, and staying at the forefront of data security, requires cross-industry collaboration. That’s why this year Flo launched a privacy and security advisory board with appointees from across the business world, including eBay’s chief privacy officer and NextDoor’s head of data, as well as Khan herself.
Khan says she’s particularly proud of Flo earning ISO 27001 certification, a difficult-to-obtain independent rating that requires meeting “the world’s most rigorous standards and attests that Flo protects users’ data at the highest standard possible,” per the company. It became the first period and ovulation-tracking platform to do so.
World-standard and all, women’s health and privacy remains personal to Khan. Her own two daughters—now ages nine and six—will one day be users of the app, and she uses it herself, too. “I can genuinely, hand-on-heart say that privacy is part of Flo’s narrative,” she tells Quartz. “I’m so incredibly proud of that.”
This story is part of Quartz’s Innovators List 2023, a series that spotlights the people deploying bold technologies and reimagining the way we do business for good across the globe. Find the full list here.
