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posted by mrpg on Sunday April 21 2019, @07:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the color-me-sane dept.

Submitted via IRC for ErnestGoesToSpace

Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are hemorrhaging user data to third parties like Facebook and Google — but often don't admit it in their privacy policies, a new study reports. This study is the latest to highlight the potential risks of entrusting sensitive health information to our phones.

Though most of the easily-found depression or smoking cessation apps in the Android and iOS stores share data, only a fraction of them actually disclose this. The findings add to a string of worrying revelations about what apps are doing with the health information we entrust to them. For instance, a Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed the period tracking app Flo shared users' period dates and pregnancy plans with Facebook. And previous studies have reported health apps with security flaws or that shared data with advertisers and analytics companies.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/20/18508382/apps-mental-health-smoking-cessation-data-sharing-privacy-facebook-google-advertising


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 22 2019, @02:44AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 22 2019, @02:44AM (#833236)

    That X app, might share your data without telling you.

    That FREE X app probably does share your data, because if they didn't, where's the motivation to make it?

    Anything you transmit "to the cloud," particularly wirelessly from a phone, though "secure" WiFi is also suspect, you can assume _might_ be intercepted and collated into a database by one or more counter-terrorism fishing fleets with access to the data streams.

    It's really nothing new - very few "confidential" psychologists are 100% true to their responsibilities to their patients, particularly when a crime - even substance abuse - is involved. When I attended Catholic school, we got a lesson in the "sanctity of the confessional" when a number of boys did something exceptionally un-Catholic and were assigned a stiff penance - it wasn't 3 hours before the head nun was berating the boys about not performing their penance as assigned, and none of the boys had mentioned anything to the nun - it was the priest who told her apparently all about it. Of course: Catholic priests and young boys, consider ourselves lucky that the confessional was the worst sanctity compromised in our school (yes, that was "a thing" even back in the 1970s it was in the news - 50 years later it apparently still has not improved...)

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