If you’re using an app to monitor various aspects of your health, you may want to look into its privacy settings, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Apps to monitor things like physical activity, food intake and other aspects of health abound, with a new study in the BMJ showing that on Google’s platform, the majority of those apps get as good as they give, since they’re harvesting a wealth of data about you. Seth Martin, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins and one developer of a health app called Corrie, explains.

Martin: That was in impressive large scale analysis of the Google Play, of the Android app store looking at mobile health apps. They looked at over 20,000 apps and then they ended up focusing on about 15,000 that were free to download. They really had sophisticated ways that they looked at apps and I don’t think it’s surprising that the apps are collecting a lot of data, sharing a lot of data, and that the privacy policies were not as transparent or accurate as they needed to be.  :29

Martin says for now, you need to be very vigilant about your apps and privacy settings. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.