Data Privacy Exercise

In class we will complete a small team activity in which you will take on roles within a mobile app startup. Your team will make decisions about what data the app will collect from users and how that data will be used. Your decisions will require ethics based tradeoffs between company resources and user trust.

The activity will be based on the following scenario.

Scenario

You are an employee of the Healthably Software Company. You are working with a team on a new mobile phone app called GlucoMon. This app enables daily glucose monitoring as well as fitness monitoring for people with diabetes.

Glucomon’s goal is to help people with diabetes record and monitor their daily blood sugar levels. It provides a place for users to enter this health data as well as ways to track it over time. It also encourages users to record data about their symptoms and moods, and users phone sensors to track things like number of times a person left their home or office and daily physical activity. Developers hope that correlating and finding patterns in this data will encourage users to take good care of their health.

Right now, Glucomon is supported by subscriptions, rather than advertising: users pay a small monthly fee to use the app. Glucomon is in a crowded market - there are many health apps for diabetics competing for users. Finally, the parent company, Healthably, is a small company without external investors or a lot of extra resources. Employees must watch the bottom line carefully.

Source

The above text and the classroom activity are from Privacy-by-Design: The Game.