Stop Apple Health Accessing My Contacts!

Instead of blindly defending Apple’s (lack of) privacy policies, how about if I offer a truly helpful response? Sound good? OK!

Your Health app stores personal information you have entered into your phone. It allows you to have access to your own health information all in one location, but also to share it with family, doctors, medical studies in which you choose to participate, AND (here’s the smoking gun) it will display some basic medical information on your locked screen for emergency responders to use and it will automatically call your emergency contacts!

The health app is looking through your contacts for your current flagged “Emergency Contacts”.

Open the Health app and review your profile (click on your photo in the app) and “Access to *Medical ID” to update or delete functions that require access to your contacts.

Disable the function that will automatically call your emergency contacts (if you use Emergency SOS to call for help, your phone notifies these contacts.)

Disable the function that will display your *Medical ID on your Lock Screen (so emergency responders can see it and also notify your emergency contacts).

Remove any medical information and emergency contacts from your *Medical ID. This would be information you previously entered.

And voila! You have now stopped the Health App from using any of your contact or personal information. Once you realize WHY the app is pinging your contacts, it’s easy to decide whether to keep it or not.

I’ve dealt with a friend who had a stroke and we couldn’t access his phone to contact family because he only used facial recognition (life support equipment gets in the way of that). After that experience, I chose to keep my own name, emergency contact numbers, blood type, and allergies listed in the Health app so anyone can pull it up on the locked screen. It’s your choice.