Privacy @ 121 Health
121 Health expands on Apple's ecosystem. As such, 121 takes privacy incredibly seriously. To relinquish any chance of data breach, your data is completely anonymized before it is sent to our servers.
“If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too. Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it.” – Tim Cook
I’ll keep this one short and sweet. Because it’s really quite simple.
We don’t know who’s using our app.
In our database, we know that your data is “yours” because when you sign in with Apple—the only sign in method on our app—we get a unique identifier from Apple that we cannot relate back to your email. This lets us serve the right insights to you in our app, but when we open up our database and see 36 character random string as your identifier, we might as well be looking at randomly generated data.
In essence, we treat all your data in way that complies with the gold standard for PHI de-identification. Of course, this makes a lot of our operations more complicated. With this setup, we can’t have social sharing on our app. We also struggled to setup a referral system: we don’t know whose who, so how can we reward users who refer other ones!1
We like to show our friends how much data we have on our servers over at stats. Imagine if Facebook did this. Not only would the numbers be in the trillions, but it would be completely obnoxious: because you would know that they are profiting off of each of those data points. But we don’t sell your data: not just because we can’t (again, your data’s anonymized), but because it’s completely unethical. We don’t profit off of more data in our databases. You do, because it directly helps us improve your insights.
So: privacy at 121 Health is completely abstracted to Apple, a company you already trust. There’s no key under our mat. Hopefully that helps improve your sleep score.
PS: we’re launching on the App Store next week. A brand-spanking new version of 121 Health will be available to everyone. And it’s definitely not what you’re expecting. Until next time,
Alex from 121 Health.
Don’t worry, we have a clever solution.