Delivery apps are now also available for medicines and other pharmacy products. This can be useful if you can’t leave the house – but it has one major disadvantage: Apparently, medication delivery apps pass on personal information.
If you order your medication directly from a pharmacy, you can be sure that the data will not be passed on to third parties. The situation is obviously different with digital shipping services for pharmacy products. Consumer advocates have checked the common drug delivery apps – and identified them as data octopuses.
Data security for drug delivery apps?No way!
The full analysis can be found on the relevant organization’s website, “Mobilsicher.de“. Accordingly, the specialist editorial team took a closer look at five drug delivery apps for the Android operating system. Each application requires a name, address, telephone number or an e-mail address. In one case, the location was also requested.
The result: three of the five drug delivery apps tested forwarded all search queries to third parties – including names, contact details, information about where they live and unique device data. In addition, some of the tested apps even checked the creditworthiness of the customers.
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With one of the apps, the examiners briefly had hope. It apparently offered users the opportunity to prevent data processing. Ultimately, however, this app also passed on some data here. The developers say they are currently working on a solution to the problem.
Third parties learn what disease you suffer from
According to “Mobilsicher.de”, a major point of criticism is the data protection declarations of the apps. These are either incorrect, imprecise or some of the links lead to nowhere.
The information passed on allows conclusions to be drawn about which diseases users of the medicine delivery app suffer from. Consumer advocates are warning of this. It is also transparent which therapies are used. This is particularly problematic when the collected search history is linked to other personal data. According to the verdict, this cannot be desirable from a consumer perspective.
Data reaches Google, Facebook and Co.
According to “Mobilsicher.de”, the data goes to American marketing and analysis services as well as to large data collectors such as Google and Facebook. In one case, up to nine third-party companies benefited from the data packages.