JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Women’s mobile health (mHealth) is a growing phenomenon in the mobile applications (apps) global market. An increasing number of women around the globe use apps with so-called female technology (femtech). Given the often private and sensitive nature of the data collected by such apps an ethical assessment from the perspective of data privacy, sharing, and security policies is warranted.

Objective:

The purpose of this scoping review and content analysis is to assess the privacy policy, data sharing and security policies of women’s mobile health apps current on the international market (AppStore’s on IOS system and GooglePlay’s on Android system).

Methods:

We reviewed 23 most popular women’s mHealth Apps on the market, we focused on publicly available apps on both Apple AppStore and GooglePlay. The 23 downloaded apps were assessed manually by two independent reviewers against mix of users’ data privacy and data sharing and security assessment criteria.

Results:

All of the 23 apps collected personal health-related data. 23 (100%) allowed behavioural tracking and 14 (61%) allowed location tracking. Only 16 apps (69.5%) displayed a privacy policy, and 12 apps (56.5%) requested consent from users, one app had a pseudo-consent. 3 apps collected data before obtaining conscnt. 20 apps (87%) shared users’ data with a third party, and for the remaining 3 apps it is not known if they shared data or not. Only 13 apps (56.5%) provided information to users about data security.

Conclusions:

A large part of the most popular women’s mHealth apps on the market have poor data privacy, sharing, and security standards. Even though regulations exist, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), current practices do not follow them. The failure standards of the assessed women’s mHealth apps to meet basic data privacy and security is unacceptable both ethically and legally.