In September, Alejandro Pérez de la Fuente presented a paper entitled Who controls your health data on Android? The role of Health Connect at the SISTEDES 2025 conference, which was held in Córdoba this year.
The research carried out in collaboration with M. Mercedes Martínez González, Amador Aparicio and Pablo Abel Criado Lozano, members of the IngPriv Group at the School of Computer Engineering of the University of Valladolid, analyses the role of Health Connect.
Health Connect is a platform developed by Google for collecting and managing health data on Android devices. Its aim is to enable different applications (e.g. sports, nutrition or wellness apps) to exchange information in a standardised and secure manner. However, this centralisation also raises important questions, which were analysed in the research presented:
- What is Health Connect and how does it integrate into the Android ecosystem?
- The risks and opportunities arising from the processing of health data in mobile applications.
- Implications for user privacy, especially in sensitive contexts such as digital health.
- The importance of having analytical frameworks in place to assess the security and control of personal information.
This study concludes that health data is one of the most sensitive categories of personal information and its processing requires special attention, both technically and regulatory. It is also important to guarantee user privacy and control. Only in this way can the responsible and secure use of this information be ensured.