Author: Lucy

4Info and Crossix team up to see if mobile ads work on medical patients

| March 8, 2016

The two companies will advertise to people who order drug refills and who visit their doctors.

Smartphone advertising firm, 4Info, has just joined up with Crossix, a pharmaceutical data company, in order to test mobile ads within the market of patients who have either visited their doctors or have ordered refills of their prescription medications.

The goal of this partnership is to determine the level of influence mobile advertising can have in this space.

The new partnership will work to measure the level of influence of mobile ads when they are delivered to people who are visiting a medical specialist or having a prescription filled. The new strategic relationship between the two companies is being made to gauge the potential of mobile devices when carefully targeting consumers within the space of the highly regulated health care industry. This has been among the goals of 4Info for some time, as it has been seeking a strategic partner for stepping into the pharmaceuticals market.

The key is to make sure there is an appropriate balance between the timing and industry regulations for the mobile ads.

mobile ads - drug refillAccording to Tim Jenkins, the CEO of 4Info, “Pharma is a huge opportunity.” Before his company partnered up with Crossix in this effort, it had previously been working with advertisers in the pharmaceutical industry in the area of targeting advertisements for non-prescription medications, through the data available via loyalty card programs.

To be clear, no medical data is used by Crossix in order to identify a specific disease or condition that an individual is treating. This will not be the nature of the mobile advertising strategy pursued by the two companies in the partnership. Instead, it obtains information from healthcare data distributors as well as individual businesses. With an analysis of that data, it determines the likelihood of a specific individual for a certain health affliction based on the non-prescription drug purchases that person has made along with the use of a loyalty card, information from prescription refills through retail pharmacies, or medical claims data that suggests a doctor has been seen.

The outcome is that, by way of data models, the companies will be able to make certain educated hypotheses as to what type of conditions each consumer could potentially have. Beyond that, 4Info tracks mobile device locations when certain apps are opened in order to determine whether or not the user is at home. When a location has been decided to be a user’s home location, targeted mobile apps based on the assumptions about that individual will be issued.

Smartphone users may be more trusting in mobile security than it deserves

| March 3, 2016

According to a recent study, Android device users are taking quite a casual attitude toward their vulnerabilities.

Proofpoint, a cyber and mobile security firm, has now released a report that has shown that users of Android devices had willingly downloaded more than two billion apps containing malicious code in 2015.

Those findings with regards to the downloading of malicious mobile apps were published in the Human Factor Report.

That report provides a closer view of the most recent cyber and mobile security trends throughout social media, mobile apps and email. Among the top findings of this report, one that is drawing a considerable amount of attention is the fact that malicious mobile applications are affecting the United States the most, with China in second place. The findings also pointed out that many of the problems with malicious apps come from downloads that are occurring in marketplaces outside of official channels.

These marketplaces are posing a considerable mobile security threat that device users seem to be ignoring.

mobile security trustThe researchers from Proofpoint discovered rogue app stores that were giving mobile device users the opportunity to download “free” clones of popular apps for both Android and iOS devices but that contained malicious code. In many circumstances, the games were clones of premium apps that were being offered for free, or included those that had been banned from the official Apple iTunes Store, luring people to these rogue marketplaces with their offer of something that was certainly too good to be true.

In order to be able to download those mobile apps, the users would have had to bypass a number of cyber security warnings along the way. Despite that fact, and the fact that downloading from those marketplaces increases the risk of downloading a malicious app by four times, many people are continuing with this activity.

The mobile security issues presented by these malicious apps can include anything from the sharing of personal information and data to revealing passwords to third parties. Downloads from those marketplaces surged during the fourth quarter of last year. Among the malicious apps that were indeed downloaded, data was communicated to 57 different countries. Of the data that was transmitted, 19 percent went to China.