You’ve gone home with a Tinder date, and things are escalating. You don’t really know or trust this guy, and you don’t want to contract an STI, so… what now?
A company called Calmara wants you to snap a photo of the guy’s penis, then use its AI to tell you if your partner is “clear” or not.
Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: You should not take a picture of anyone’s genitals and scan it with an AI tool to decide whether or not you should have sex.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“With lab diagnosis, sensitivity and specificity are two key measures that help us understand the test’s propensity for missing infections and for false positives,” Daphne Chen, founder of TBD Health, told TechCrunch.
HeHealth is framed as a first step for assessing sexual health; then, the platform helps users connect with partner clinics in their area to schedule an appointment for an actual, comprehensive screening.
HeHealth’s approach is more reassuring than Calmara’s, but that’s a low bar — and even then, there’s a giant red flag waving: data privacy.
“It’s good to see that they offer an anonymous mode, where you don’t have to link your photos to personally identifiable information,” Valentina Milanova, founder of tampon-based STI screening startup Daye, told TechCrunch.
This sounds reassuring, but in its privacy policy, Calmara writes that it shares user information with “service providers and partners who assist in service operation, including data hosting, analytics, marketing, payment processing, and security.” They also don’t specify whether these AI scans are taking place on your device or in the cloud, and if so, how long that data remains in the cloud, and what it’s used for.
Calmara represents the danger of over-hyped technology: It seems like a publicity stunt for HeHealth to capitalize on excitement around AI, but in its actual implementation, it just gives users a false sense of security about their sexual health.
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