Understanding sharing preferences and behavior for mHealth devices

If people are not in control of the collection and sharing of their personal health information collected using mobile health (mHealth) devices and applications, privacy concerns could limit their willingness to use and reduce potential benefits provided via mHealth. We investigated users' willingness to share their personal information, collected using mHealth sensing devices, with their family, friends, third parties, and the public. Previous work employed hypothetical scenarios, surveys and interviews to understand people's information-sharing behavior; to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first privacy study where participants actually have the option to share their own information with real people. We expect our results can guide the development of privacy controls for mobile devices and applications that collect any personal and activity information, not restricted to health or fitness information.