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Privacy by Design in Personal Health Monitoring

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Abstract

The concept of privacy by design is becoming increasingly popular among regulators of information and communications technologies. This paper aims at analysing and discussing the ethical implications of this concept for personal health monitoring. I assume a privacy theory of restricted access and limited control. On the basis of this theory, I suggest a version of the concept of privacy by design that constitutes a middle road between what I call broad privacy by design and narrow privacy by design. The key feature of this approach is that it attempts to balance automated privacy protection and autonomously chosen privacy protection in a way that is context-sensitive. In personal health monitoring, this approach implies that in some contexts like medication assistance and monitoring of specific health parameters one single automatic option is legitimate, while in some other contexts, for example monitoring in which relatives are receivers of health-relevant information rather than health care professionals, a multi-choice approach stressing autonomy is warranted.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was funded by the European Commission (the project “Personalized Health Monitoring – Ethics” (PHM-Ethics); contract number 230602) and New Tools for Health (VINNOVA, Sweden).

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  1. Centre for Applied Ethics, Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden

    Anders Nordgren

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  1. Anders Nordgren
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Correspondence to Anders Nordgren.

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Nordgren, A. Privacy by Design in Personal Health Monitoring. Health Care Anal 23, 148–164 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-013-0262-3

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