Content Analysis of Medical and Health Apps’ Privacy Policies

Abstract

Privacy is a fundamental human right and is widely end extensively protected in the western industrialized world. The recent advances in technologies, especially in the use of applications developed and designed for mobile devices, have led to the rise of its abuse on one hand and a higher awareness of the importance of privacy on the other side. Legal texts protecting privacy have attempted to rectify some of the problems, but the ecosystem giants and mobile apps developers adapted. In this paper, we analyze which data mobile apps developers are collecting. We have focused on a sample of apps in the medical and health field. The research was done using collocations analysis. A relationship between a base word and its collocative partners was sought. The initial visual results have led us to more detailed studies that unveiled some worrying patterns. Namely, applications are collect data about the users and their activities, but also about their family members, medical diagnoses, treatments, and alike, going well beyond the “need to function” / functionality threshold.