As more and more tech gadgets are making its way to human essentials and daily routine, the more insecurity is prevailing. Most importantly, the health apps might be the source of insecurity. Recent studies show that mental health app might share your data. So user must use them carefully. It’s important for health apps to keep your data under lock and key. But it’s not clear that’s the case for some mental health apps.
As per reports, few of these apps which are working with depression and smoking quite seems to be vulnerable. Such apps have particularly sensitive data like health diaries and voluntary substance use reports.
Mental health app might share your data
Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are leaking the user data to third parties like Facebook and Google. When asked they don’t admit it in their privacy policies, a new study reports. This study is the latest to highlight the potential risks of hand over sensitive health information to our phones.
So, a study of 36 mental health apps has revealed that 29 of them were sharing data for advertising or analytics to Facebook or Google. On the other hand, the most shocking thing is that handful of them weren’t disclosing that to users.
According to report, just six out of 12 Facebook-linked apps told users what was happening. Besides that while 12 out of 28 Google-linked apps did the same. Out of the entire bunch, just 25 apps had policies detailing how they used data in any form, while 16 described secondary uses.
So studies warns that user must carefully used such apps, these mental health apps might share your data. In fact most of the easily-found depression or smoking cessation apps in the Android and iOS stores shares data, only a fraction of them actually discloses this.
The findings add to a string of worrying revelations about what apps are doing with the health information user entrust to them.
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