Health and fitness tracking app spying on you? Study finds your fear and concern is not unwarranted

Fitness apps and health apps are tracking and collecting user data, as research published in British Medical Journal reveals.

Fitness bands these days have become an essential tool considering the COVID times we live in. Earlier, it was only used to track the steps and other fitness activities, but now people have turned to fitness bands to track their vitals including the SpO2 and heart rate. But It has now been discovered that the fitness tracking apps that are often used to pair the smartwatches are collecting and tracking user data, the Guardian reports. In research published in the British Medical Journal, Muhammad Ikram, a lecturer at the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub had stated that over 88 per cent of fitness apps were found to be using “tracking identifiers and cookies to track user activities on mobile devices, and some of these applications are actually using tracking across different platforms”. Over 20,000 mobile health apps on the Google Play Store were tested during the research. The report stated that some apps required users to disclose sensitive information related to their health conditions. Some apps are also used to track menstrual cycles. The researchers found that around two-thirds of the app could collect advertising identifiers or cookies whereas one-third could collect information like users email address. Some apps can also identify the mobile phone tower connected to the users’ device, which also discloses the location of the user. However, it was found that only four per cent of health apps transferred users data to a third party.