The thing that most people don't realize is that the legally enforced HIPAA protections they take for granted no longer apply when they request their medical data from a healthcare institution and store it in a third party app -- like Apple Health.
The only thing protecting your medical records from being data-mined and monetized is Apple Health's privacy policy and (current) technical architecture. You've seen examples of it in the news with women's period tracking apps, but it'll become even more common as apps start leveraging APIs opened by the 21st Century Cure's Act.
I'm not a tin-foil hat wearing engineer, but I can forsee a day when Apple's reputation of being "Privacy-conscious" might not be worth as much money as the medical data they've collected from their customers.
It's one of the reasons why I decided to build my own open-source PHR, so that the incentives between the software and me as an individual are kept in alignment.
The thing that most people don't realize is that the legally enforced HIPAA protections they take for granted no longer apply when they request their medical data from a healthcare institution and store it in a third party app -- like Apple Health.
The only thing protecting your medical records from being data-mined and monetized is Apple Health's privacy policy and (current) technical architecture. You've seen examples of it in the news with women's period tracking apps, but it'll become even more common as apps start leveraging APIs opened by the 21st Century Cure's Act.
I'm not a tin-foil hat wearing engineer, but I can forsee a day when Apple's reputation of being "Privacy-conscious" might not be worth as much money as the medical data they've collected from their customers.
It's one of the reasons why I decided to build my own open-source PHR, so that the incentives between the software and me as an individual are kept in alignment.
https://github.com/fastenhealth/fasten-onprem