Nearly half of period-tracking apps studied used or shared data for third-party advertising, according to an analysis by cybersecurity and VPN company Surfshark.
The review examined 20 popular apps from the Apple App Store and ranked each app depending on the amount and sensitivity of the information they collect. For instance, an app received one point for data collected that isn't linked to a...
As consumer health apps continue to increase in popularity, so do experts’ fears over user privacy.
A new study published in the BMJ that analyzed more than 20,000 medical, health and fitness apps suggests that these apps have "serious problems" related to privacy and data collection.
"Our results show that the collection of personal user information is a pervasive practice in mHealth apps, and...
Prying eyes. Polar now joins Strava in the list of fitness app makers accidentally betraying military information. According to a report from the Dutch publication De Correspondent, an opt-in feature within the app posts users’ routes to an online map can become a gateway to their private information with diligent searching and a simple modification of the browser’s web address. Working with the...
A security vulnerability affecting more than 3,000 mobile apps is exposing more than 4 million protected health records that include prescription details and sensitive chat messages, according to a report from mobile app security firm Appthority.
The opening — which also includes 2.6 million plaintext passwords and user IDs, 25 million GPS location records, and 50,000 financial records — is a...
Just last week, the Consumer Electronics Association released guidelines about privacy policies for health and fitness devices. At the Partners Healthcare Connected Health Symposium in Boston last week, a panel of experts also had some ideas about maintaining privacy and security in the world of health and fitness devices -- a world where HIPAA often doesn't apply.
Right now, the biggest...
According to a new study from Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Cologne in Germany, less than a third of health apps in the iTunes and Google Play store had any privacy policy at all in place.
"Our findings show that currently mHealth developers often fail to provide app privacy policies," study authors wrote. "The privacy policies that are available do not make information privacy...
