92% of apps are sharing your data without consent.
Researches have found out that majority of the mental health applications are sharing your data with Facebook and Google. By intercepting the traffic, researchers were able to identify apps sharing usernames, app type and self reporting substance.
The application tested did not have an opt-out option, 9 of the apps did not have any privacy policy, while the only 5 which had a privacy policy did not warn the users and few said that the data won’t be shared. While researchers were not able to pinpoint how the data was used, it is easy to imagine, with username, health issue types, companies such as insurance firms could benefit from it.
In this digital age, we now need to have institutions, which will verify and approve such apps to better protect us. Should Google, Facebook, and other adversary be held to account and not only the developers, if so how?
