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DeepMind will collect pathology test data to determine who is at risk
Researchers warn that the use of common health applications could mean that private information about health problems is not kept confidential.
Of the 24 health applications in the BMJ study, 19 shared user data with companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon.
He warns that this could then be pbaded on to other organizations, such as credit bureaus, or used to target advertising.
And the data was shared while the developers often claimed not to collect personally identifiable information.
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Users could be easily identified by collecting data such as the unique address of their Android phone, according to the study.
"The semi-persistent Android ID will uniquely identify a user within the Google universe, giving it a tremendous reach and ability to gather extremely diverse user information," wrote the author. 39 research team in the BMJ.
"These apps claim to offer appropriate and cost-effective health promotion – but they pose an unprecedented risk to consumer privacy, given their ability to collect user data, including sensitive information.
The authors conclude:
- doctors must warn patients of the threat that such applications pose to their privacy
- regulators should consider that the loss of privacy is not a fair cost for the use of digital health services
Professor Alan Woodward, security expert, from the University of Surrey, said: "Users still do not understand how the data they entrust to these applications are shared."
Professor Gil McVean, of the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, said there was no evidence of wrongdoing, but the study did showed "how behind-the-scenes information sharing between a network of technology companies can potentially be used to create an understanding of an individual's health and activity."
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