Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 20, 2019
Date Accepted: Jun 22, 2020
A Scale to Assess the Fairness of Privacy Policies of Mobile Health Applications: A Case Study in Cancer Apps
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of mHealth apps for cancer is widely increasing. Many studies explore their efficiency, content, usability, and adherence. However, these apps have created a new set of privacy burdens, as they store personal and sensitive data.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to refine and evaluate a scale, based on the General Data Protection Regulation, to assess the quality of the privacy policies of mHealth apps.
Methods:
Based on the experience of our previous work, we redefined some of the items and scores of our privacy scale. Using the new version of our scale, we conducted a case study through the analysis of the privacy policies of Android cancer applications. A systematic search of mobile cancer apps was performed in the Spanish version of the Google Play website.
Results:
The redefinition of certain items reduced the discrepancies between the reviewers. Thus, the use of the scale is easier, not only for the reviewers, but for any potential user of our scale. The assessment of the privacy policies revealed that 29.0% of the applications included in the study do not have a privacy policy, 32.3% have a score over 50 out of a maximum of 100 points, and 38.7% were under 50 out of 100 points.
Conclusions:
In this paper we present a scale for the assessment of mHealth apps. The scale emerges as an improved version of our previous scale with adjusted scores. Through a case study, the scale results showed a lack in the quality of the privacy policies of the mHealth apps that were included in the study and provides developers with a tool to evaluate their privacy policies.
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