Thanks to the coronavirus, thermometers are a must have these days. Kinsa's smart thermometers take your temperature like a regular thermometer--there's one that does it in the ear and another the oral, under arm, anal way. What makes these thermometers interesting is that they connect to Kinsa's app via Bluetooth and give you personalized guidance based on your symptoms. They also take the health data they collect from the over two million thermometers in use and anonymously aggregate this date to see where illness outbreaks are happening down to a county or zip code level in the United States. You can even access this information at their site healthweather.us. This might worry some privacy experts, while making many public health experts working to battle illness outbreaks happy.
Que pourrait-il se passer en cas de problème ?
Kinsa seems to do a pretty good job with privacy and security. They say they won’t sell your personal information, which is good. They may de-identify and aggregate your personal information to create "Illness Signals" to help inform where and when illness is spreading. According to a 2018 NY Times article, they can use this de-identified data to target ads to an area based on illness outbreaks, or as they state in their privacy policy, “Help companies direct their marketing to sicker areas.” That sounds creepier than it probably actually is...we hope.
And de-identifying personal data is generally an OK practice and can help better public health, although many privacy researchers will point out it can be relatively easy to de-anonymize such data. If you’re looking for a smart thermometer that doesn’t share this sort of aggregated data, the Withings Thermo currently doesn't share health data to help determine public health outbreaks in an area.
What's the worst that could happen? You could record your symptoms in the app. Kinsa sees that you and seventeen others like you in your county have the same symptoms, alert public health officials to a potential outbreak of illness, and public health officials step in to stop further spread of the illness. That doesn't sound too bad in the age of coronavirus.
Conseils pour vous protéger
- Be very careful what third party companies you consent to share you health data with. If you do decided to share your health data with another company, read their privacy policy to see how they protect, secure, and share or sell your data.
Ce produit peut-il m’espionner ?
Caméra
Appareil : Non
Application : Non
Microphone
Appareil : Non
Application : Non
Piste la géolocalisation
Appareil : Non
Application : Oui
Que peut-on utiliser pour s’inscrire ?
Adresse e-mail
Oui
Téléphone
Non
Compte tiers
Non
Signup is not required to use the Kinsa thermometer. Signup with email address is required to use the Kinsa app's full features.
Quelles données l’entreprise collecte-t-elle ?
Personnelles
Name, email, birthdate, gender, location
Corporelles
Temperature, symptoms, diagnosis
Sociales
Comment l’entreprise utilise-t-elle les données ?
Comment pouvez-vous contrôler vos données ?
Quel est l’historique de l’entreprise en matière de protection des données des utilisateurs et utilisatrices ?
No known incidents in the last 3 years.
Ce produit peut-il être utilisé hors connexion ?
Informations relatives à la vie privée accessibles et compréhensibles ?
Liens vers les informations concernant la vie privée
Ce produit respecte-t-il nos critères élémentaires de sécurité ?
Chiffrement
Mot de passe robuste
Mises à jour de sécurité
Gestion des vulnérabilités
Politique de confidentialité
Le produit utilise-t-il une IA ?
Cette IA est-elle non digne de confiance ?
Quel genre de décisions l’IA prend-elle à votre sujet ou pour vous ?
The AI does not make decisions for the users, according to Kinsa.
L’entreprise est-elle transparente sur le fonctionnement de l’IA ?
Les fonctionnalités de l’IA peuvent-elles être contrôlées par l’utilisateur ou l’utilisatrice ?
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