Privacy Policies' Readability Analysis of Contemporary Free Healthcare Apps

mHealth apps have a vital role in facilitation of human health management. Users have to enter sensitive health related information in these apps to fully utilize their functionality. Unauthorized sharing of sensitive health information is undesirable by the users. mHealth apps also collect data other than that required for their functionality like surfing behavior of a user or hardware details of devices used. mHealth software and their developers also share such data with third parties for reasons other than medical support provision to the user, like advertisements of medicine and health insurance plans. Existence of a comprehensive and easy to understand data privacy policy, on user data acquisition, sharing and management is a salient requirement of modern user privacy protection demands. Readability is one parameter by which ease of understanding of privacy policy is determined. In this research, privacy policies of 27 free Android, medical apps are analyzed. Apps having user rating of 4.0 and downloads of 1 Million or more are included in data set of this research.RGL, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level, SMOG, Gunning Fox, Word Count, and Flesch Reading Ease of privacy policies are calculated. Average Reading Grade Level of privacy policies is 8.5. It is slightly greater than average adult RGL in the US. Free mHealth apps have a large number of users in other, less educated parts of the World. Privacy policies with an average RGL of 8.5 may be difficult to comprehend in less educated populations.