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Health and Fitness apps may be selling your data

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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According to Evidon, an analytics and privacy firm, the top 20 health and fitness apps, like MapMyFitness and Web MD Health, give data they collect to third-party companies, possibly including insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Health and fitness tracking apps are increasingly popular. From tracking your diet and exercise, to monitoring illnesses and sleep, the trend for using your smartphone to help regulate your lifestyle is growing. The Quantified Self movement is dedicated to using technology to gather data about our everyday lives so we can improve them. But many of these health and fitness apps are free, and sell their data as a way to monetize.

Health and Fitness apps may be selling your data

However, its important to stress that this data is not personally identifiable, and much of it is used to help giving you better targeted ads, which support many of these free apps. Traditionally medical records and details have been fiercely protected, but as users are willingly giving their health data to companies this protection is being eroded.

Selling app usage data is nothing new; it’s a common way of making a free service pay, and does have some advantages. Targeted advertising can be less annoying than random ads that don’t mean anything to you, for example. However, health data is a sensitive subject, and users may be surprised to find out the data they keep on their apps is being used by the companies that make them.

We will follow up on this story soon.

[Sources: FT.com, The Telegraph]

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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