Health apps share potential health concerns and user identifiers with ad firms

>What we learned was that several popular Android health apps including Drugs.com Medication Guide, WebMD: Symptom Checker and Period Calendar Period Tracker gave advertisers the information they’d need to market to people or groups of consumers based on their health concerns.

>The Drugs.com Android app, for example, sent data to more than 100 outside entities including advertising companies, DuckDuckGo said. Terms inside those data transfers included “herpes,” “HIV,” “adderall” (a drug to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), “diabetes” and “pregnancy.” These keywords came alongside device identifiers, which raise questions about privacy and targeting.

>Drugs.com said it’s not transmitting any data that counts as “sensitive personal information” and that its ads are relevant to the page content, not to the individual viewing that page. When The Post pointed out that in one case Drugs.com appeared to send an outside company the user’s first and last name — a false name DuckDuckGo used for its testing — it said that it never intended for users to input their names into the “profile name” field and that it will stop transmitting the contents of that field.