Last week, Apple updated its app review guidelines to prohibit HealthKit apps from storing users' health information in iCloud, just before news broke that hackers had stolen hundreds of private celebrity photos off the cloud-based storage service.
It's most likely a coincidence the guideline update and celebrity photo hack occurred simultaneously, or, as Morgan Reed, executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology, told Politico, "colossally bad timing."
Keeping developers from allowing protected health information to be stored on iCloud is less an admission iCloud is not secure and more a desire on Apple's part to avoid HIPAA liability, according to a Businessweek report.
Jonathan Collins, a mobile health analyst at ABI Research, told Businessweek he expects Apple to address security concerns when launching HealthKit, though he doesn't think consumers will be less eager to use HealthKit following the highly publicized celebrity photo hack. "It will clearly have to be addressed, but I don't believe it will be a major brake on adoption," he said in the report.
Apple is set to debut the HealthKit platform Sept. 9.
More articles on HealthKit:
Apple updates HealthKit privacy rules prohibiting developers from selling PHI to advertisers
30 things to know about mHealth
Mount Sinai, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Allscripts in talks to incorporate Apple's HealthKit