FPF Offers 'Practical' Privacy Guidelines to Safeguard Wearable-Produced Health Data
The Future for Privacy Forum released guidelines to help companies that develop wearable devices and wellness apps follow "practical" privacy safeguards. In a Wednesday news release, FPF, which developed the guidance with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
companies need to incorporate the Fair Information Practice Principles -- a set of eight principles rooted in the 1974 Privacy Act -- to protect consumer-generated health and wellness data. FPF generally recommended companies provide consumers with choices about data sharing and usage, support interoperability with global privacy frameworks and app platform standards and "elevate data norms" for scientific research, privacy and security. The best practices guide was released in conjunction with a FPF mobile apps survey. It said 70 percent of the top health and fitness apps have a privacy policy, about 6 percent lower than top apps overall. Sixty-one percent of health and fitness apps are linked to the privacy policy from the app store listing page, about 10 percent lower than the top apps overall. In May, the Center for Democracy and Technology and Fitbit released a report that also outlined privacy best practices for the industry, which is expected to get even more guidance (see 1606100029 and 1606200027).