Data Sharing in Mobile Health Platform

doi:10.14529/cmse210403

Efficient Attribute-Based Secure Data Sharing with Hidden Policies and Traceability in Mobile Health Networks

Mobile Information Systems ◽

10.1155/2016/6545873 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 2016 ◽

pp. 1-13 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Changhee Hahn ◽

Hyunsoo Kwon ◽

Junbeom Hur

Keyword(s):

Data Sharing ◽

Mobile Health ◽

Healthcare Providers ◽

Personal Health ◽

Sensitive Information ◽

Health Records ◽

Health Networks ◽

Secure Data ◽

Constrained Environments ◽

Access Privileges

Mobile health (also written as mHealth) provisions the practice of public health supported by mobile devices. mHealth systems let patients and healthcare providers collect and share sensitive information, such as electronic and personal health records (EHRs) at any time, allowing more rapid convergence to optimal treatment. Key to achieving this is securely sharing data by providing enhanced access control and reliability. Typically, such sharing follows policies that depend on patient and physician preferences defined by a set of attributes. In mHealth systems, not only the data but also the policies for sharing it may be sensitive since they directly contain sensitive information which can reveal the underlying data protected by the policy. Also, since the policies usually incur linearly increasing communication costs, mHealth is inapplicable to resource-constrained environments. Lastly, access privileges may be publicly known to users, so a malicious user could illegally share his access privileges without the risk of being traced. In this paper, we propose an efficient attribute-based secure data sharing scheme in mHealth. The proposed scheme guarantees a hidden policy, constant-sized ciphertexts, and traces, with security analyses. The computation cost to the user is reduced by delegating approximately 50% of the decryption operations to the more powerful storage systems.

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Women’s mHealth Apps: Scoping Review and Content Analysis of Privacy, Data Sharing, and Data Security Policies (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.33735 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Najd Alfawzan ◽

Markus Christen ◽

Giovanni Spitale ◽

Nikola Biller-Andorno

Keyword(s):

Content Analysis ◽

Data Sharing ◽

Mobile Health ◽

Scoping Review ◽

Data Security ◽

Data Privacy ◽

Global Market ◽

Security Policies ◽

Privacy Policy ◽

Mhealth Apps

BACKGROUND Women’s mobile health (mHealth) is a growing phenomenon in the mobile applications (apps) global market. An increasing number of women around the globe use apps with so-called female technology (femtech). Given the often private and sensitive nature of the data collected by such apps an ethical assessment from the perspective of data privacy, sharing, and security policies is warranted. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this scoping review and content analysis is to assess the privacy policy, data sharing and security policies of women’s mobile health apps current on the international market (AppStore’s on IOS system and GooglePlay’s on Android system). METHODS We reviewed 23 most popular women’s mHealth Apps on the market, we focused on publicly available apps on both Apple AppStore and GooglePlay. The 23 downloaded apps were assessed manually by two independent reviewers against mix of users’ data privacy and data sharing and security assessment criteria. RESULTS All of the 23 apps collected personal health-related data. 23 (100%) allowed behavioural tracking and 14 (61%) allowed location tracking. Only 16 apps (69.5%) displayed a privacy policy, and 12 apps (56.5%) requested consent from users, one app had a pseudo-consent. 3 apps collected data before obtaining conscnt. 20 apps (87%) shared users’ data with a third party, and for the remaining 3 apps it is not known if they shared data or not. Only 13 apps (56.5%) provided information to users about data security. CONCLUSIONS A large part of the most popular women’s mHealth apps on the market have poor data privacy, sharing, and security standards. Even though regulations exist, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), current practices do not follow them. The failure standards of the assessed women’s mHealth apps to meet basic data privacy and security is unacceptable both ethically and legally.

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