Unveiling Privacy Perspectives about Health Apps on a Large Scale

In this paper we study users' opinions about the privacy of their mobile health apps. We look at what they write in app reviews in the 'Health & Fitness' category on the Google Play store. We identified 2832 apps in this category (based on 1K minimum installs). Using NLP/LLM analyses, we find that 76% of these apps have at least some privacy reviews. In total this yields over 164,000 reviews about privacy, from over 150 countries and in 25 languages. Our analyses identifies top themes and offers an approximation of how widespread these issues are around the world. We show that the top 4 themes - Data Sharing and Exposure, Permission Requests, Location Tracking and Data Collection - are issues of concern in over 70 countries. Our automatically generated thematic summaries reveal interesting aspects that deserve further research around user suspicions (unneeded data collection), user requests (more fine-grained control over data collection and data access), as well as user behavior (uninstalling apps).