Beyond privacy policies - assessing inherent privacy risks of consumer health services

There is a rapidly growing market for direct-to-consumer health services offered through the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT). Personal health information is one of the most sensitive types of data;while consumer health services have many potential health benefits, privacy advocates have warned consumers about the privacy risks associated with the indiscriminate use of direct-to-consumer services. Some tools and methods have been developed to aid consumers in assessing the privacy risk of ICT-based consumer health services. Most of these methods focus on the privacy policies published by the service provider, and are limited to a particular class of service offerings, e.g., Personal Health Records. While these methods have proven useful in gauging the apparent risk associated with certain types of services, they fall short of addressing the inherent risks of an entire spectrum of different service types. Moreover, privacy policy based risk assessment falls short of catching some of the more subtle privacy threats, such as indirect information disclosure due to targeted advertisements and social computing. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing a complementary tool to aid consumers in gauging the inherent privacy risks associated with consumer health services. The tool was developed based on a systematic review of the types of services and their associated privacy risks.