Report: Personal health data should be off-limits to common marketing practices

From the cover of the report

Personal wearables that track health data can boost your exercise routine or monitor a medical condition.

The devices — including digital watches, sensor-equipped clothes, and apps in smartphones — can track heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, stress levels, and someday may store information on our DNA.

But, according to an extensive new report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and American University, their information shouldn’t be treated like ordinary marketing data.

The report, “Health Wearable Devices in the Big Data Era: Ensuring Privacy, Security, and Consumer Protection,” says that many common techniques for utilizing marketing data — including lookalike modeling, predictive analytics, scoring, programmatic advertising, and “buying and selling of individual consumers” — threaten consumer privacy in unprecedented ways when it comes to health data and status.

“Health data is personal information and should get higher standards” than other kinds of data, CDD executive director and report co-author Jeffrey Chester told me.

The report’s three authors — Kathyrn Montgomery, Chester, and Katharina Kopp — say they were behind the 1990s campaign that led to COPPA, the influential Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.