Analyzing Privacy Risks of MHealth Applications

Mobile health applications are expected to play a major role for the management of personal health in the future. For this purpose, the apps collect a lot of sensitive data from sensors or direct user input, combine it with automatic data such as GPS location data, store it locally and pass it on to web-platforms (often running in a public cloud), where the information can be managed and often shared with others in social networks. However, it is usually not transparent for the user how this sensitive information is handled and where it goes to. This paper shows the result of the analysis of mobile health applications regarding the handling of sensitive data especially with respect to transmission to third-parties.