Better Analysis of Privacy Issues in eHealth Apps
Some work has been done to analyse the privacy policies of mobile apps, however, no work has been done to deeply understand and analyse the most common privacy issues reported in eHealth app user reviews on a large scale. We wanted to identify the challenges that users face while reading and reviewing the privacy policies of eHealth apps and let them end up accepting the privacy policies and data use agreements without fully understanding them or knowing how app creators use users' collected data.
In this study, we did a large-scale detailed analysis of privacy policies and data use agreements of commonly used eHealth apps. We found that better approaches are needed to ensure that users are fully aware of the apps’ privacy policies before using them. Also, we developed a tool to calculate the readability of privacy policies and the estimated time users need to fully read them. We found that most eHealth apps' privacy policies are complex and require over 15 minutes to be read by users. In addition to providing evidence-based recommendations for developers of eHealth apps to ensure that their app descriptions and policies are better understood by users.
Project Lead
Omar Haggag
Project Team
Prof John Grundy, Dr Mohamed AbdelRazek, Dr Sherif Haggag
