Your Mental Health Data is For Sale! The Impact of Data Brokers on the Exchange and Use of Mental Health Data and the Related Implications on the Personal Privacy of Depressed and Anxious Individuals
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2025-12-08
Date
2021-12-03
Author
Advisors
Hoffman, David
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Abstract
The purpose of this thesis was to make more transparent the opaque data broker industry
and its processes for selling and exchanging mental health data about depressed and
anxious individuals. The research is critical as more depressed and anxious individuals
utilize personal devices and software-based health tracking applications (which are
not protected by HIPAA), often unknowingly putting their sensitive mental health data
at risk. By initiating sales inquiries with the data brokers, purchasing a dataset,
and evaluating the privacy policies of ten firms, this thesis unveiled the data broker
industry and the exchange of mental health data in the data economy. Furthermore,
the findings highlight the industry’s lack of business best practices, particularly
concerning issues of privacy. The unregulated and black-box nature of the data broker
industry, the exchange of sensitive mental health data, and the lack of clear consumer
privacy protections necessitate a comprehensive federal privacy law or, at the very
least, an expansion of HIPAA’s privacy protections.
Type
Honors thesisPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25029Citation
Kim, Joanne (2021). Your Mental Health Data is For Sale! The Impact of Data Brokers on the Exchange and
Use of Mental Health Data and the Related Implications on the Personal Privacy of
Depressed and Anxious Individuals. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25029.Collections
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