Discovering mHealth Users’ Privacy and Security Concerns through Social Media Mining
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the various privacy and security concerns conveyed by social media users in relation to the use of mHealth wearable technologies, using Grounded Theory and Text Mining methodologies. The results of the emerging theory explain that the concerns of users can be categorized as relating to data management, data surveillance, data invasion, technical safety, or legal & policy issues. The results show that over time, mHealth users are still concerned about areas such as security breaches, real-time data invasion, surveillance, and how companies use the data collected from these devices. Further, the results from the emotion and sentiment analyses revealed that users generally exhibited anger and fear, and sentiments that were negatively expressed. Theoretically, the results also support the literature on user acceptance of mHealth wearables as influenced by the distrust of companies and their utilization of personally harvested data.