Privacy by design

The symptom diary app with ZERO health data collection

24th May 2021

You probably already know that almost all apps collect data. Often, this is personalised data (linked to you as an individual), which is sold to numerous 3rd parties who want to add yet more data to their online profiles they hold about you, or used to target advertising at you.

This is how so-called “free“ apps recoup the tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds it requires to develop an app and maintain it over time. This is a revenue model called surveillance capitalism.

One of the many problems with surveillance capitalism is that, aside from the fact that hundreds of organisations that you have never heard of now know an incredible amount about you personally but you know nothing about them, as we have seen time and time again your personal data is highly likely to be stolen by hackers.

And even if you do trust the app, and the data brokers who buy user data from app developers, there is always the risk that the data will be lost to hackers through a data breach, which is now almost a daily occurrence.

I designed Chronic Insights to be different. I wanted to give us the choice of using a symptom diary which is truly private. The only way to guarantee this is to not collect data.

That’s why the Chronic Insights mobile app only collects anonymous crash data, which is used to diagnose and fix bugs and errors in the app. No health data, no email addresses, no login details, no IP addresses, no GPS - just the privacy that we deserve.