A study shows that a number of smartphone applications approved by the NHS leak sensitive information that could be used in fraud or identity theft.

The smartphone applications included in the study are found in the NHS England's Health Apps Library, which is tasked to test programs and ensure that they pass the set standards on clinical and data safety.

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Applications listed in the NHS Health Apps Library include those that are recommended both for personal and for professional use covering mental health, cancer, and diabetes.

Amidst the safety precautions the app has to go through, researchers in London discovered that many NHS-approved applications disregard the current privacy policy and sent unencrypted data.
Currently, the applications that disclose the maximum data have now been removed from the library.

Kit Huckvale, a Ph.D. student at the Imperial College London and co-author of the study, stressed that if these apps were ordinary health apps, they would not have been surprised with these findings. 

He further reiterated that these applications have supposedly been filtered by a known organization so that they pass the standards set. He considers the fact that they are protecting the data poorly very alarming.

In the study Huckvale et al. made, the used 79 different applications listed in the NHS library and supplied them with fake data in a period of six months, BBC reports. These apps were geared towards helping users lose weight, stop smoking and cut back on drinking, to name a few.

According to the Wired, although none of these apps encrypted personal information, 66 percent of the applications sent identifying information without encryption and 20 percent currently had no privacy policy.

NMost of the apps share a person's identity and phone number and do not share information on the user's health. Results show that four of these apps sent sensitive information on the user's identity and health without protecting it. Two of these cases out the users at risk for data theft.

Even though there have been no reports on users getting their data compromised, researchers urged the developers of these applications to respond.

TagsNHS, HEALTH APPS, Smartphone Apps, identity, identity theft, NHS-approved Health Apps