Our Research Finds Too Many Health Apps Ignore or Assume Your Consent

Hello,

As part of our ongoing research into how health apps respect your privacy, we recently sent a survey asking people if they understand when they have “consented” to the sharing or selling of their personal information. And, well, it’s official: data privacy consent is confusing. We’re here to shine a light.

Read "What Does Giving Your 'Consent' Really Mean?", our research report on how health apps handle your consent.

Inside, we call out companies that, in our opinion, fail to respect your consent. How can efforts to get your consent be genuine when 56% of Mozilla supporters who responded to our survey said that they aren’t sure when they’ve given it? And while most of us are confused about what consent does mean, we seem to agree about what it should mean, with over 80% saying consent should be asked in advance, freely given, and reversible.

We thought you should know about the bizarre (and legal) ways apps get your “consent” to do things with your personal data you probably don’t want them to, like share it for advertising and more. We also included some tips on how to spot these tactics so you can take more control of your privacy.

Thank you for reading and supporting *Privacy Not Included,

Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov & Zoë MacDonald

Your *Privacy Not Included Team
Mozilla