If people are not in control of the collection and sharing of their personal health information collected using mobile health (mHealth) devices and applications, privacy concerns could limit their willingness to use and reduce potential benefits provided via mHealth. We investigated users' willingness to share their personal information, collected using mHealth sensing devices, with their family, friends, third parties, and the public. Previous work employed hypothetical scenarios, surveys and interviews to understand people's information-sharing behavior; to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first privacy study where participants actually have the option to share their own information with real people. We expect our results can guide the development of privacy controls for mobile devices and applications that collect any personal and activity information, not restricted to health or fitness information.Our study revealed three interesting findings about people's privacy concerns regarding their sensed health information: 1) We found that people share certain health information less with friends and family than with strangers, but more with specific third parties than the public. 2) Information that people were less willing to share could be information that is indirectly collected by the mobile devices. 3) We confirmed that privacy concerns are not static; mHealth device users may change their sharing decisions over time. Based on our findings, we emphasize the need for sensible default settings and flexible privacy controls to allow people to choose different settings for different recipients, and to change their sharing settings at any time.
In this article, the author draws upon ethnographic data from a group of homeless and housed youth and young adults who congregated in one city square in the northeastern United States. The author applies social capital theories to understand the positive and negative aspects of street life for each group involved. In this setting, participants found commonalities and befriended one another. By maintaining and nurturing these ties, each group expanded their access to both practical and symbolic resources and provided one another with affective supports, which alleviated feelings of alienation and isolation. Participants benefited in multiple ways by participating, but also placed themselves in potentially harmful and problematic situations as a result. The author explores the utility as well as consequences of extended social ties made through these subgroup affiliations to understand the nuances of social capital and the role of diversified peer groups within homeless street settings.
Qualitative findings suggest that professional groups in health care vary in the extent of information control they have, as well in how they view such control. Some groups may be more likely to (be able to) resist changes in the professional control of information that stem from new technologies or regulatory policies. Some professionals recognize that new IT systems and regulations challenge existing social control of information in health care, with the potential to undermine (or possibly bolster) professional self-control for some but not necessarily all occupational groups.
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