Mobile health applications have a clear potential to bring significant benefits to individual citizens and to society as a whole. Citizens can benefit from continuous and readily accessible support in monitoring, evaluating and improving their health. Society as a whole not only benefits from having a healthier population, but can also gain new knowledge and develop new services and applications on the basis of the data processed via these apps.
However, data concerning health is highly privacy sensitive. Therefore, mobile health apps must be designed in such a way that the privacy of the end users is optimally protected. Similarly, these apps have the potential to empower users, provided that: the users receive sufficient insight into the functioning of the app, and are able to assess more easily which of the many apps on the market meet their privacy concerns. This Code has been developed with these goals in mind: it provides an accessible and effective tool to ensure that mobile health apps have been properly developed, and that they can be entrusted with data concerning health in a manner that complies with European legal principles of data protection law.
Download: Draft Code of Conduct on Privacy for Mobile Health Applications (.pdf, 672 KB).
Download from eHealthNews.eu: Draft Code of Conduct on Privacy for Mobile Health Applications (.pdf, 672 KB).
The Code of Conduct on privacy for mobile health apps has now been formally submitted for comments to the Art 29 Data Protection Working Party. Once approved by this independent EU advisory group, the Code will be applied in practice: App developers will be able to voluntarily commit to follow its rules, which are based on EU data protection legislation.