Things are getting worse now that you’ve gone home with a Tinder date. You do not know or trust this individual well, and you do not wish to contract an STI, so… Now what?
Take a picture of the guy’s penis and send it to Calmara. The company will use AI to tell you if your partner is “clear” or not.
To start, let’s clear something up: you shouldn’t take a picture of someone’s genitalia and use AI to figure out if you should have sex. 
There are more red flags in Calmara’s theory than on a bad first date. Things get even worse when you consider that most STIs don’t cause any symptoms. It’s possible that your boyfriend has an STI, but Calmara would tell you that he’s fine. That’s why real STI tests look for infections in blood and urine instead of looking at the person.
There are other startups that are taking a more sensible approach to the need for easy access to STI tests.
Daphne Chen, founder of TBD Health, told Eltrys, “With lab diagnosis, sensitivity and specificity are two key measures that help us understand how likely it is that the test will miss infections or give false positives.” “Even the most thorough tests can have some flaws, but test companies like Roche are honest about their validation rates for a reason: so doctors can understand what the results mean.”
Calmara’s small print warns against using its results as a substitute for medical advice. But its advertising makes that seem unlikely. The website’s title used to say “Calmara: Your Intimate Bestie for Unprotected Sex” before Eltrys contacted the company. Since then, the company has changed the title to “Safer Sex.” It also calls itself “The Perfect Website for Looking Up!” in a promotional video.
Calmara’s co-founder and CEO, Mei-Ling Lu, told Eltrys that the app didn’t intend to be a serious medical tool. “Calmara is not a medical app; it’s a lifestyle app.” It does not include any medical issues or discussions, and there are no doctors involved with the Calmara experience right now. You can get information from it for free.
“Right now, we’re changing the communications to better show what we want to do,” Lu said. “It is clear that the goal is to start a conversation about STIs and testing.”
HeHealth launched it in 2019. Both utilize the same AI, reputed to be 65–90% accurate. HeHealth aims to serve as the initial step in assessing an individual’s sexual health. It then helps users find partner centers in their area and make an appointment for a full test.
While HeHealth’s method is safer than Calmara’s, that’s still not very high, and there’s a big red flag there: data protection.
“It’s great that they have an anonymous mode where you don’t have to connect your photos to personally identifiable information,” Valentina Milanova, founder of Daye, a company that uses tampons to screen for STIs, told Eltrys. However, this does not imply that their service is de-identified or anonymous; your photos may still be associated with your email address or IP address.
Because they use Amazon Web Services, HeHealth and Calmara also say they are in line with HIPAA, a law that protects patient privacy. While this may seem like a good thing, Calmara’s privacy policy says that it does share user data with “service providers and partners who assist in service operation, including data hosting, analytics, marketing, payment processing, and security.” Additionally, they do not specify whether these AI scans take place on your device or in the cloud, and if they do, they do not specify the duration of data retention or its intended use. Users can’t be sure that their private photos are safe with that kind of language.
Not only are these security questions scary for the users, but they’re also bad for the business. What happens if a child checks for STIs on the website? Then, Calmara finds itself in possession of information revealing child sexual abuse. Calmara’s answer to this moral and legal responsibility is to state in its terms of service that it does not allow children to use it, but that would not help in court.
Calmara shows the risk of technology that gets too much attention: HeHealth appears to employ AI as a marketing ploy, yet its implementation merely inflates people’s perceptions of their physical well-being. Those are very bad results.
Chen said, “I can see where their intentions are good; sexual health is a tough area to innovate in.” “I just think they might market a solution too quickly that isn’t ready yet.”
