Privacy International writes:
Harnessing new digital technology to improve people’s health is now commonplace across the world. Countries and international organisations alike are devising digital health strategies and looking to emerging technology to help solve tricky problems within healthcare. At the same time, more and more start-ups and established tech companies are bringing out new, and at times innovative, digital tools aimed at health and wellbeing.
Wellness apps, consumer wearables and medical AI are almost certainly here to stay. But at PI we’re concerned that these digital tools may not always have been designed with people’s privacy, autonomy, and rights in mind. As a result, people could be being asked (even if inadvertently) to make unfair sacrifices when seeking to improve how they manage and understand their health.
We’ve written elsewhere about the risks and benefits of digital health in general and why health and privacy must not be traded off against each other. In this piece, we take a closer look at some of the specific digital tools that can infringe people’s privacy, and in particular at how four Big Tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) are now involved in healthcare. We then discuss how a tech-first approach to healthcare, as potentially prioritised by the tech industry, could have long-lasting and potentially negative consequences for society as a whole.
Read more at Privacy International.
h/t, Joe Cadillic