Attitudes of Covid‐19 patients toward sharing their health data: A survey‐based study to understand security and privacy concerns

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Many people around the world, especially at the time of the Covid‐19 outbreak, are concerned about their e‐health data. The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of patients with Covid‐19 toward sharing their health data for research and their concerns about security and privacy. METHODS: This survey is a cross‐sectional study conducted through an electronic researcher‐made questionnaire from February to May 2021. Convenience sampling was applied to select the participants and all 475 patients were referred to two to Afzalipour and Shahid Bahonar hospitals were invited to the study. According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 204 patients were included in the study and completed the questionnaire. Descriptive statistics (frequency, mean, and standard deviation) were used to analyze the questionnaire data. SPSS 23.0 was used for data analysis. RESULTS: Participants tended to share information about “comments provided by individuals on websites” (68.6%), “fitness tracker data” (64.19%), and “online shopping history” (63.21%) before death. Participants also tended to share information about “electronic medical records data” (36.75%), “genetic data” (24.99%), and “Instagram data” (24.99%) after death. “Fraud or misuse of personal information” (4.48 [±1.27]) was the most common concern of participants regarding the virtual world. “Unauthorized access to the account” (4.38 [±0.73]), “violation of the privacy of personal information” (4.26 [±0.85]), and “violation of the patient privacy and personal information confidentially” (4.26 [±0.85]) were the most of the unauthorized security incidents that occurred online for participants. CONCLUSION: Patients with Covid‐19 were concerned about releasing information they shared on websites and social networks. Therefore, people should be made aware of the reliability of websites and social media so that their security and privacy are not affected.