This appeared last week:
Health apps may not disclose sharing your personal information
By Linda Carroll on Apr 26, 2019 11:59AM
Black Dog Institute report finds privacy shortfall.
While nine out of ten phone apps for depression and smoking cessation assessed in a recent study were found to be sharing user data with third parties, only two out of three disclosed they were doing so.
Much of that data, including linkable identifiers, was shared with Google and Facebook, among others, but barely half of apps sharing data with those two giant companies told users about it, researchers report in JAMA Network Open.
“If you download a mental health or smoking cessation app, there’s a high chance it will share marketing, advertising or usage tracking data with either Facebook or Google,” said the study’s lead author Kit Huckvale, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute in Randwick, Australia.
“Unfortunately, in many cases, there’s no way to tell that this is happening and you can’t rely on the privacy policy to tell you.”
While the apps studied by Huckvale and his colleagues didn’t appear to be directly sharing mental health information, “what we did see was information indicating the kinds of apps people are using,” Huckvale said in an email. “That can be enough to reveal what conditions people might have.”
Huckvale and his colleagues assessed 36 top-ranked depression and smoking cessation apps designed for Android and iOS. The researchers downloaded the apps onto an Android phone or an iPhone and then put the apps through their paces. All network traffic generated during those simulated uses was intercepted with specialised software.
The destination and content of each transmission was tagged automatically to identify whether the app’s developer or a third party was being contacted. The researchers also noted instances when personal and other user-generated data was contained in the transmissions.
Much more here:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/health-apps-may-not-disclose-sharing-your-personal-information-524304
There is little to be said about this other than it simply ought to stop and use of this type of information to support an advertising based business model has not place I believe.
Even if the apps need to charge a dollar or two for the app this is far preferable to secret client betrayal. A further example appeared a week of two ago!
Is your pregnancy app sharing your intimate data with your boss?
As apps to help moms monitor their health proliferate, employers and insurers pay to keep tabs on the vast and valuable data
All app users need to be aware such things not only happen frequently but may not be fully disclosed.
David.
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