A Privacy Policy Comparison of Health and Fitness Related Mobile Applications

Many mobile device end users believe that privacy is important when dealing with personal health-related information, but the challenge is to develop privacy policies in a meaningful way so that mobile software application developers can adequately meet the requirements of their intended end users. Comprehensive privacy policies, which meet self-regulatory guidelines of increasing transparency on data collection, are often written in a way that average mobile users cannot understand or completely ignore. This paper provides the results of a privacy policy comparison including application permissions requested and several readability metrics used to assess the current state of privacy policies in the health and fitness mobile application market. Our analysis indicates that developers may not be considering their end-users’ reading comprehension levels and specific application permissions are not adequately addressed when developers are creating their privacy policies.