Dive Brief:
- Several free mobile medical applications for healthcare professionals share users' names, national provider identifiers and other personal data with pharmaceutical advertisers, according to a story in iHealthBeat.
- For example, Epocrates' privacy policy allows the company to share customers' personal information with an advertiser if the customer engages with the advertiser's promotional content.
- In another example, Medscape's privacy policy states that if a user engages with promotional content on the app, the app can share country of practice, name and specialty.
Dive Insight:
You know the old expression, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"? That's what you've got here, folks. There are, and will always be, information services pharmas happy to subsidize. And there will always be someone who's willing to collect the info and sell it to the pharmas. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Now, is it a good idea? That's your call. But there's no point in being shocked about this – it's going to happen.