Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Aug 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 2, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Assessment of privacy policy compliance for chronic disease management applications in China
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the development of mobile health, chronic disease management applications have brought the possibility of reducing the burden of chronic diseases and also brought huge privacy risks to patients' health data.
Objective:
The purpose of the study is to analyze the extent to which chronic disease management apps comply with personal information security regulations.
Methods:
This article analyzed the privacy policies of 39 popular chronic disease management apps, introduced a scale based on personal information security specifications, and analyzed the compliance of privacy policies from various stages of the information life cycle.
Results:
26 apps (66.7%) have a privacy policy and the average score of these apps is 39 points.
Conclusions:
It was found that most chronic disease management apps in China have a privacy policy, but the content expression was ambiguous and unclear, and it did not meet the requirements of regulations. Besides, the security issues at the information destruction stage were ignored by most app vendors.
Citation
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Copyright
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