Health apps raise privacy concerns

Samuel Burke explains how health apps are a potential goldmine for advertisers and health insurers.

Each time Christine Ingram takes a run, her apps are up at running before she even takes off.

"I use technology everytime I run. I track my run and it keeps track of how far I ran, how many calories it burned and what the time was, where I ran, what time today."

Like so many exercise enthusiast carrying a smartphone. "It has my total amount of run that I have ever made."She likes to keep a close eye on the progress she's making. But when the run is finished, the data remains stored on the app. And a study just released by data intelligence firm Evidon shows that 20 of the most used health apps are sharing information with third party companies.

"Mobile applications are using third party data collection and advertising tools in order to monitor those applications. It happens across all types of apps, including ones that users may find fairly sensitive like health and fitness wellness applications."

The apps in the study cover everything from running apps to apps that let women track their menstrual cycles. Many of the companies behind the apps insist they are only sharing analytics about their apps' functionality and use, not any identifiable information about user's identity or health? And they say that's no different from the tracking that many popular websites engaged in.

"The advertiser may be interested in your location if they sell energy drinks or smoothies. So they may look for where is this person, where did he complete his run and how close the nearest smoothie place so they can advertise what specially smoothie to him."

Sports psychologist Melinda Nicci says it's only natural that we would be more concerned about the device storing data related to our bodies and health.

"When you got your social networking on, you can be a certain personal. You can create a persona for yourself. But with health tracking, it's real matrix and real senses tracking things that are all completely real and in real time and a lot of time as well. So I think it's kind of vulnerability about giving that much away that we can't control. "

The information those health apps track maybe a gold mine for advertisers but it could be more even valuable to health insurance companies and they are indeed moving into apps' business and making partnerships with companies like Mapmyfitness. But that app's policy explicitly states the user must opt in before any data shared with an insurance company.

"Maybe the company behind the most popular health apps go to great strength to try to keep their users' information private. But apps are business too, so they have to look for innovative and creative ways to make money which could make information about us and our bodies more and more valuable."