Social Listening & Health Apps – Big Data Spies On Our Health

Hi Steemians! Social media listening or just social listening describes the monitoring of social media channels in terms of brands, competitors, themes or trends. The results are analyzed and strategies are inferred. One of the aims is to obtain an overall social media sentiment for a certain topic which can be helpful to decide on marketing strategies, product messages, and so forth. There are companies like Brandwatch specialized on this who claim to analyze the billions tweets sent around worldwide (500 million tweets are sent each day that is 6000 per second)

Whoever you’re looking for, Audiences makes it simple to find groups of people based on what matters to you – their demographics, passions, professions, where they’re based, and who they engage with.

So far so good. At least they openly declare that they spy on what you post and tweet. (But wait, not that openly, only on their webpage – if everybody would know about this then the people would not post every fart of their life, would they? They can´t be that stupid.)

Anyway, what stunned me was to find out that also in the heavily regulated pharma industry this is done. If tweets are tapped to identify adverse event data then acceptable (pharma companies are obliged per law to collect any kind of adverse event information they get aware of and have to report once yearly a safety update report to Authorities).

But it goes far beyond that. The picture shows what a specific pharma company (name known) aims to find out about you. Data from social media, electronic health records (eHR, should be actually very, very protected), purchase information from Amazon and of course smartphone app data. This is very scary if they would indeed get all this, combine it and run their analyses on it.
Health care data are even more sensitive than other personal data like e.g. location data not only because they are a very private part of you. It might have a direct economic impact for you if insurance companies get a hold of e.g. risky behaviours or health risks. Hacking of health records skyrockets and things emerging from your health records might be detrimental to your career even if you have kept your (public) internet footprint as clean as that of a baby.
Remember the Anthem data breach? That was spectacular but the millions of tiny daily breaches, unnoticed but continously draining data from your devices in sum could be equally deleterious.
A study from 2016 showed that sensitive health information from various Android diabetes apps was routinely collected and shared with third parties, 56 of 65 apps placed tracking cookies, and even from the 19 apps with privacy policies, 8 shared data with third parties without disclosing this fact.
Think about it next time wehn you use your health trackers, Fitbits, smart watches or your apps.

The solution?
There is none. What you could do is to abstain from most of the smartphone and digital health apps (and of course Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) and if you need to visit a physician or hospital, ask persistantly what data about you are stored, how and where they are stored and that you want to have a copy of them (might help you in case of an identity theft).

Sorry, was too lazy to translate to German, but in Europe the situation is not too different. We Europeans are usually even more keen to protect our personal data. But I doubt that our (chronically underfunded (sick funded 😊)) hospitals, our insurance companies, our governments are in any way better protecting our health data, let alone the global social media whose business model is to sell them for good money.

Don´t forget:
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product!

Sources:
https://www.brandwatch.com/
https://2017-epiforum.eventify.it/
http://pharmamkting.blogspot.co.at/2016/03/many-mhealth-apps-share-personal-health.html