AUSSIE RESEARCH FINDS ‘PERVASIVE’ PRIVACY BREACHES ON HEALTH APPS

Thousands of health-related mobile phone applications have "serious problems with privacy," according to analysis by Macquarie University in Australia.

Published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Sydney-based team's research into more than 20,000 apps found "collection of personal user information" to be "pervasive," Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.

Of the almost 5 million apps available on platforms operated by Apple and Google, around 100,000 are health-related. However "inadequate privacy disclosures" often hinder users "from making informed choices," said the Macquarie researchers, who compared 15,000 health, medical and fitness apps with a sample of 8,000 others.

While the health apps gathered fewer user data than others, around two-thirds of them still "could collect advert identifiers or cookies" and a quarter could "identify the mobile phone tower to which a user's device is connected."

A quarter of the apps violated their own privacy policies, according to the BMJ research, with as many again either not providing any such terms in the first place or having "user data transmissions" occur via "insecure communication channels."

Almost 90 percent of "data collection operations" more than half of the data transmission "were on behalf of third party services, such as external advertisers, analytics, and tracking providers," the researchers found.

WEEKLY FEATURE : PAL READY TO SOAR WITH PANDEMIC