Many popular mobile health applications may help improve your fitness and well-being, but users should weigh those benefits against the likely loss of privacy from the personal information they extract in return for their services, according to new reports by a California-based privacy rights group.
Unbeknownst to most users, “(m)ore than 75% of the free mobile health apps and 45% of the paid apps we researched use some kind of behavioral tracking, often through multiple third-party analytics tools,” and often with multiple tracking devices operating simultaneously.
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Madigan
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has asked a number of popular online healthcare websites and healthcare services providers to be more transparent about their privacy policies and how they use their customers' personal information.
Madigan said she sent letters to executives at WebMD.com, weightwatchers.com, drugs.com, menshealth.com, mayoclinic.com, about.com, health.com and mercola.com, asking them to disclose how much users' health information they capture, how they store it and whether they share it with outside companies.
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