Information Science Reference Privacy Concerns Surrounding Personal Information Sharing on Health and Fitness Mobile Apps

Health and fitness apps collect various personal information including name, email address, age, height, weight, and in some cases, detailed health information. When using these apps, many users trustfully log everything from diet to sleep patterns. However, by sharing such personal information, end-users may make themselves targets to misuse of this information by unknown third parties, such as insurance companies. Despite the important role of informed consent in the creation of health and fitness applications, the intersection of ethics and information sharing is understudied and is an often-ignored topic during the creation of mobile applications. Privacy Concerns Surrounding Personal Information Sharing on Health and Fitness Mobile Apps is a key reference source that provides research on the dangers of sharing personal information on health and wellness apps, as well as how such information can be used by employers, insurance companies, advertisers, and other third parties. While highlighting topics such as data ethics, privacy management, and information sharing, this publication explores the intersection of ethics and privacy using various quantitative, qualitative, and critical analytic approaches. It is ideally designed for policymakers, software developers, mobile app designers, legal specialists, privacy analysts, data scientists, researchers, academicians, and upper-level students. About the Author Professor, Algonquin College, Canada.Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY.