True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.
Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?
To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.
iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.
What could possibly go wrong?
Although the iPhone has historically been known to keep user data “safe,” this is not a given, and there have been hacks and data breaches over the years.
CrowdStrike happened – from just a simple coding error. In 2015, all of my confidential data given to the DoD and the FBI in order to get a security clearance was harvested by the Chinese government, when they hacked into the government’s “super-secret,” and “super-secure” government data storage site. In response, the government offered me a credit report and monitoring of my credit score for a year. Yeah – thanks.
The bottom line – no data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now. This type of information should not be harvested and stored.
Furthermore, trusting that Apple will never sell that data or pass it off to research groups is very naive. In fact, mental health data is already being mined.
Apple has partnered with various health organizations and academic institutions to conduct health-related studies, such as Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Michigan on various health studies. Apple also collaborates with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Digital Mental Health Study. This study likely utilizes data collected through Apple devices to investigate mental health patterns and outcomes. Trusting that the user identifiers have been completely stripped before that data is passed on is a risk that one takes when entering such information into an iPhone.
Read More: iPhone Now Collects Your Mental Health Assessments