Your health app could be sharing your medical data with a host of companies

That nifty new health app you downloaded to your phone to keep track of your meds might be sharing your information with a host of unrelated companies, some of which have nothing to do with healthcare, a new study finds.

When researchers ran two dozen medication apps through their paces using a phony identity, to track what was being done with the data, they found that sharing was routine and far from transparent.

“The key finding from our study is that health related data is widely shared with companies that have nothing to do with health,” said study leader Quinn Grundy, an assistant professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Toronto. “The consumer has no way to know exactly what is happening with their data and what consequences there might be.”