Health apps run into privacy snags Before Celeste Steenburger takes off on her morning run, she taps the orange button on the MapMyRun app on her iPhone to track the exercise. The 30-year-old office manager counts calories, logging the food she eats into a separate Lose It! app. When her menstrual cycle begins, she marks the details in the Period Tracker Lite app. With each bit of health data Ms Steenburger records, third-party companies, some with names she has never heard of, are receiving information about her. Exclusive research conducted for the Financial Times by Evidon, a web analytics and privacy group, found that the top 20 most visited apps transmit information to a web of nearly 70 companies. Take MapMyRun, one of the apps Ms Steenburger uses to track her runs. The Evidon study found that 11 separate companies beyond the app's developer were transmitted data from the app. Those include advertising companies, some of which are subsidiaries of Google, and other digital analytics and tracking groups. "That does concern me," Ms Steenburger says. If I wanted to give my information to those companies I would. This is Big Brother. The findings come after an investigation earlier this summer of 43 popular health and fitness apps conducted by advocacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found "considerable privacy risks" not described in the app privacy policies. "Consumers should not assume any of their data are private in the mobile app environment - even health data that they consider sensitive," the report stated. The use of health apps has exploded in recent years. Both the Apple and Google stores offer several hundred for download. Some developers are now predicting a phase of consolidation with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies likely buyers, as those industries seek out new avenues to learn more and communicate with customers. The trend has serious implications for consumers. Data which an individual has willingly handed over to an app develop to better track their own health, could now land in the hands of a large insurer who might use that data to set policy premiums. Many of the app and third-party companies say that they do not sell information about their users and that any user information that is transmitted is not personally identifiable. They also say information is more typically used to improve their own apps. While the tracking and brokering of data about internet users on the computer has grown into a sophisticated business during the past couple of years, the business is still in its early days for mobile, app executives say. The growing interest in the data generated by their apps is creating dilemmas for developers. "If an insurance company were to want to buy iPeriod, I'd say no," says Leon Atkinson-Derman, chief executive of Winkpass Creations, which makes the popular menstrual cycle tracking app. The fact of the matter is, insurance companies are trying to learn things about people and use it against them. iPeriod will soon have the capability to target ads at a very fine level. So a woman who records in the app that she gets headaches before her period could soon receive an ad for a pain reliever at just the right time of the month. Mr Atkinson-Derman has also been approached by pharmaceutical companies interested in targeting ads to women. Several other tracking companies see a different relationship with insurers, arguing both sides share an interest in keeping people active and healthy. MapMyFitness, for example, earns half of its revenue from partnerships with large health insurance companies such as Humana and Aetna. It built a special platform for Humana, which mimics the fitness and calorie tracking features of MapMyFitness, the first of its kind for an insurance company. Humana offers this to the members of its employee health plans. When users meet certain fitness benchmarks, they are offered discounts on their health premiums or certain employers offer rewards such as vacuum cleaners or luxury vacations as an incentive to keep people healthy. "By getting certain populations more active, they can reduce the cost burden for employers around those people," says Chris Glode, the general manager for MapMyFitness. If you can get people more active, can improve their health outcomes. That's really cool, we're really psyched to be part of that. Companies including MapMyFitness, and RunKeeper, a similar kind of fitness tracker, are also partnering with Aetna by allowing users to voluntarily turn their data over to the insurer. Aetna has started its own health data repository called Care Pass, which integrates information from mobile health apps with the company's own claims data. "Any other insurance provider would be welcome to integrate as well, provided they abide by our privacy policy," says Jason Jacobs, founder and chief executive of RunKeeper. Everything is up to the user. The data will never be sent anywhere the user does not explicitly permit. Mobile analytics group Flurry has emerged as one of the dominant companies tracking details about people's mobile phone use. Flurry, which offers tools for app developers to measure their audiences and sells ads based on the data it collects, boasts of tracking 3.5bn app sessions a day. Nine of the top 20 health-related apps were found to transmit data to Flurry, according to the Evidon research. But Flurry says that healthcare is not a segment that it focuses on, and that the information it tracks is not personally identifiable and only used in the aggregate. "Our data are not for sale," says Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry. A lot of people would like the Flurry data to do a lot of things with it.