A Study of the Security and Privacy Risks in Health-Related Mobile Applications in India

With the increased adoption of mobile devices in the current scenario, the number of applications in every category has also skyrocketed. In recent years, health-related applications have also become increasingly common. This paper aims to investigate whether the increasing prevalence of health-related applications has been accompanied by the implementation of robust cyber-security and privacy measures. In our analysis of the 21 most popular health-related Android applications available on the Google Play Store in India, it has been observed that 95% of the applications have the M8: Security Misconfiguration vulnerability of the OWASP Mobile Top 10 – 2024. It was also found that 90% of the applications have embedded trackers, which can have tremendous privacy and security implications, given the sensitive nature of health-related information. These trackers may collect sensitive user information, often without user consent and may introduce additional vulnerabilities into the application. These findings underscore the need for the adoption of security best practices in the development of health-related applications. It also shows the need for effective implementation of security and privacy regulations such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (India) 2023.