Most medical and fitness apps in Google Play have tracking capabilities enabled and their data collection practices aren’t transparent
As many as 88 percent of almost 21,000 mobile health (mHealth) applications that are accessible on the Google Play Store from Australia include code that can access and even share users’ personal data with third parties, an analysis by the Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub in Sydney has found.
The paper – dubbed Mobile health and privacy: cross sectional study and published by the British Medical Journal – looked at 8,000 apps classified as ‘medical’ and 13,000 apps falling into the ‘health and fitness’ bracket. These are almost all mHealth apps that are accessible in the Google Play Store from Australia. Overall, close to 100,000 apps across both Google Play and Apple Store belong to the two categories.
As part of their research, the scholars conducted an in-depth analysis of almost 16,000 free mHealth apps found in Google’s app marketplace and compared their privacy practices against a baseline sample of close to 8,500 non-mHealth apps.
What did the research find?
“The main types of data collected by mHealth apps include contact information, user location, and several device identifiers. Part of these identifiers (specifically, international mobile equipment identity (IMEI), a unique identifier used for fingerprinting mobile phones; media access control (MAC), a unique identifier of the network interface in the user’s device; and international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), a unique number that uniquely identifies every user of a cellular network) are unique and persistent (ie, they are immutable and cannot be changed or replaced) and can be used by third parties to tra ..
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