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Status: 06.02.2023 4:43 p.m
Anyone who is on the Internet with a cell phone or smartwatch is constantly leaving data – including health data. Many companies are interested in them. Experts warn of the consequences of tracking.
How many steps, how many calories and how high the heart rate: This is data that so-called wearables such as smartwatches record. All of this benefits large corporations such as Apple, Amazon and Google, because they have also wanted to conquer the healthcare industry for years.
“Information is important currency”
The big corporations are not only active in the field of health data, but also in others. That’s a problem, says Stefan Vilsmeier, the founder and head of Brainlab AG, a global medical technology company. He would like clear rules to prevent the influence of global platforms on the healthcare industry from getting out of hand.
“The link between the two segments is particularly problematic. If Amazon and Google are involved in the field of health data, the data must be clearly separated.” According to Vilsmeier, health data should not be lightly passed on and used for marketing purposes within the same company.
In his opinion, Amazon, for example, should not use health data for its own purposes in order to create customized advertising for customers. “In general, Google and Amazon make profits from data, because today information is an important currency with which you can precisely tailor certain offers to the right people.”
Market power as a factor
The data that Google, Amazon & Co. collect through tracking led to an information advantage, Vilsmeier. “The monopolies then use this lead to place their own goods and services ahead of those of the competition.” This leads to distortion of competition, “because they then prefer their own products and services and there is no fair pricing in sales”.
Large providers such as Amazon could possibly determine the prices in various segments and force competitors out of the market. The problem is also “that giants like Amazon and Google can very quickly become the largest healthcare provider in the world due to their size and market power”.
Some tech company failures
Tracking could bring further disadvantages for patients: For example, insurance companies could use collected health data to better analyze the health risks of their customers – and then charge correspondingly higher prices. “The problem then is that life insurance or health insurance is no longer offered at fair prices because the background information is known. That is discriminatory for patients who have a previous illness or an impending illness,” warns Vilsmeier.
However, the tech giants have also experienced some failures in their foray into the healthcare industry. Amazon discontinued its Amazon Care telehealth service. The IBM group sold its health division Watson Health to a financial investor. And Google failed with the original plan to develop a large network for data exchange between doctors, hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry from its Google Health service.
When Alexa recognizes the dementia
Vilsmeier warns of the consequences of large-scale data collection by tech companies. “As long as you’re healthy, tracking can be a good way to know where your health is. However, companies can link this data from different areas.”
Location services and position data can now draw a relatively accurate movement profile of the patient. In addition, many patients google their illness before going to the doctor or the clinic. If you combine the data, Google knows which clinical picture the patient is suffering from and that he was just in the hospital.
Another example: health data provided by voice recognition systems such as the Amazon service Alexa. “By evaluating speech profiles, Alexa can identify the first signs of onset of dementia or other cognitive disorders very early on,” says Vilsmeier.
Advertising after the video consultation?
Data from third-party providers may also be tapped during medical video consultations. Video consultations that are billed to health insurance companies must be certified beforehand and are subject to strict data protection requirements.
However: “If the patients have given their consent, then advertising can be placed there before and after the consultation hours – but not during it,” says Thomas Moormann, head of health and care in the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations.
Beware of accepting cookies
According to the expert, increased caution is required, especially when agreeing to cookies: “If you are on a platform of a telemedicine portal and are looking for a specific specialist, then you are already giving away important data – for example that you have a specific doctor have health problems.”
However, the stricter regulations for the video stream itself do not apply here, warns Moormann: “This means that the use of health data for advertising purposes is permitted at this point, provided you have given your prior consent.”
Therefore, consumers should pay close attention to which cookies they accept or reject, especially since providers sometimes provide insufficiently marked or even no consent at all when it comes to the processing of health data, as a recent study by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations shows.
Question about the commercial interest
Collecting and analyzing health data can make many things possible in research. At the same time, critics see politicians as having a duty to ensure that large corporations do not overuse health data.
European data protection law applies in Europe, even if data is uploaded to US companies. However, consumers should ask themselves more precisely who is using their data – and what commercial interest might be behind it.