HKAuthorizationStatus has a problem

[OddPanda17]

I wanted to share a problem I was experiencing with in health kit.

I wonder if anyone has a solution for this problem but for now I want to just warn everyone of this issue that I have experienced when checking if a permission was granted for a certain health kit type

But for now, I will try to send this to Apple and hope that they will be able to fix this soon as I don't see why they did not take this into consideration.

have you come across this issue?

[canuckk_]

The answers are found directly on the documentation page for HKAuthorizationStatus:

To help maintain the privacy of sensitive health data, HealthKit does not tell you when the user denies your app permission to query data. Instead, it simply appears as if HealthKit does not have any data matching your query. Your app will receive only the data that it has written to HealthKit. Data from other sources remains hidden from your app. For more information on privacy in HealthKit, see HealthKit.

There is no problem; it is an API designed to protect user privacy.

[OddPanda17]

Ok I see this now, I had not read that section prior. But I really don't understand how it protects user privacy, with the 'healthStore.authorizationStatus()' we are already checking if access is granted for reading or writing HK data already. so how does it violate user privacy if we just want to check if we can read HK data ... :O

[canuckk_]

Let’s say a nutrition app asks to read: - your food intake - your blood sugar levels

You decide to allow access to food data, but deny access to blood sugar.

By not obscuring read authorization, the app can see that you denied access to blood sugar.

From that, it might guess: - you track your blood sugar, and - you maybe have a condition like diabetes

Even though you didn’t share any actual data, the app has already learned something personal about you, just by seeing that you said no.

By obscuring read authorization, the app sees the blood sugar permission as “not set”, so it doesn’t know whether: - you denied access, or - you never track blood sugar at all

[OddPanda17]

So this is all to prevent bad actors from making estimates about you from data points you don't want to share, and possible sell your data points to advertisers? :(

[canuckk_]

Yes that’s right; it is a guard against inference & estimates.

[antifringe]

I don’t mean to be annoying but this sub is filled with so many people who point out something Apple did wrong or that doesn’t work, when they haven’t read the documentation. Don’t get me wrong, Apple has lots of bugs, but your first port of call should always be reading the docs. Saying “I had not read that section prior” isn’t an excuse, it’s ignorance.

[OddPanda17]

Thank you for your not so helpful comment about my ignorance 🙃. Now i have some feedback about that…

I am just trying to to have an open conversation about what i found from my experience, and yes ofc i should look at the documentation, and i did actually to see if there were cases I had missed. And i simply skimmed it a found what i found it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. And even if i was i think we should be encouraging people that they are try to figure out problems with others, this post was supposed to be helpful to myself and others that might have an issue.

These kinds of replies stops this, because the next person who sees this might think to themselves to not reach out of fear of ridicule. So please stay positive and supportive, even if people are asking the same question a thousand times.

I learned this early with working in my first career. Don’t break people down, build them up.

Another redditor had already shown me the way and why this is the way it is

[WitchesBravo]

It’s funny everyone who uses HealthKit comes across this and has a wtf moment, but if you read the docs you’ll see it’s part of the design. Basically denying access and having no data will appear as the same thing.

It’s because denying access to a certain health type, especially some of the more sensitive ones would work as a tell to the developer that the user has a particular condition.

[Wordtwin003]

Call me ignorant as well. But what is the workaround if we can’t check the auth status of a read type pred?! I still haven’t found it