"Your Doctor Is Spying on You": An Analysis of Data Practices in Mobile Healthcare Applications

Mobile healthcare mHealth applications promise convenient, continuous patient-provider interaction but also introduce severe and often underexamined security and privacy risks. We present an end-to-end audit of 272 Android mHealth apps from Google Play, combining permission forensics, static...

Trump Administration and Big Tech want you to share your health data

US President Donald Trump announced a loose plan Wednesday to allow Americans to voluntarily upload and port their medical records across hospitals, clinics, technology companies, and health apps, with broad participation from Google, Apple, OpenAI, Amazon, and more. While the system could help...

HARPT: a Corpus for Analyzing Consumers' Trust and Privacy Concerns in Mobile Health Apps

We present HARPT, a large-scale annotated corpus of mobile health app store reviews aimed at advancing research in user privacy and trust. The dataset comprises over 480,000 user reviews labeled into seven categories that capture critical aspects of trust in applications, trust in providers and...

Threat Source newsletter (Sept. 29, 2022) — Personal health apps are currently under a spotlight, but their warning signs have always been there

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I’ve spent the past few months with my colleague Ashlee Benge looking at personal health apps’ privacy policies. We found several instances of apps that carry sensitive information stating they would share certain...

Physician, protect thyself: healthcare cybersecurity circling the drain

No one knows you better than you do. But thanks to technology advances and the continued digitization of healthcare data accumulation and sharing processes, we can also honestly say the same about your healthcare provider. Indeed, every time we get in touch with a health professional, data is...

Many Health and Fitness Apps Remain Vulnerable

It seems little has changed over the last several years when it comes to how health and fitness apps go about securing user information. According to a survey carried out by the firm Arxan last fall, 86 percent of health apps it reviewed at had at least two critical vulnerabilities and 55 percent...