JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, health care products and services exist in a primarily online environment. Patient data is held in digital repositories, and various hardware and software health products share users’ health information across platforms. Although these products have many benefits, they also introduce risks to consumers, ranging from hacking of websites to consumer tracking to subtle disclosure of personal identifiers. The purpose of this project was to examine perceptions of privacy in the context of health information. Previous research in this area has shown that consumers in this area demand greater transparency of data collection, data usage, and comprehensive health privacy protections. This project has been the first study to examine the personal perception of privacy for consumers who use digital healthcare products. Develop a scale measuring the desire for privacy in online health care products and services. Identify the individual differences that predict this desire for privacy. Participants: N = 1000, recruited through Lucid Theorem (nationally representative) Materials and Procedure: Exploratory factor analysis was used to select ten items that captured the central construct and made up the Concern About Digital Privacy of Health Information (CADPHI) scale. This scale was correlated with a variety of other measures, including the BFI-2 personality inventory (which measures individual personalities), the MTUAS (which measures positive and negative attitudes toward technology) and the GCBS (which measures the tendency to believe in conspiracies). Through the examination of correlates in the scales, this study has been conducted with MTUAS (Rosen et al., 2013), the BFI-2 personality inventory (Soto et al., 2017), GCBS (Brotherton et al., 2013), and demographics. The following correlations from the Concern About Digital Privacy of Health Information (CADPHI) scale are as follows: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Personal Data, Negative Attitudes, Generic Conspiracist Beliefs, and Age. Unsurprisingly, older participants and people who tend to believe in conspiracy theories were more concerned with digital privacy. In addition, while negative beliefs about technology predicted privacy concerns, positive beliefs about technology were unassociated with concern. Interestingly, agreeableness was predictive of concern. Neuroticism and conscientiousness were unsurprisingly predictive of concern. The integration of health information and patient-generated data from products/services (i.e., health-related mobile device apps) are not covered by HIPAA. This study has shown that many consumers desire health privacy in the storage of their health data. By profiling people who are particularly likely to be concerned, marketing campaigns focused on assuaging those concerns (e.g., with new, more secure products and services) could be targeted towards them. Conversely, people who are insufficiently concerned about privacy may be particularly fruitful marketing targets for products that inherently demand disclosure from their users.