What your medication list reveals about you
A drug name, its dose and the time it is taken frequently imply a diagnosis — which is why this counts as a special category of personal data under GDPR Article 9. Medifix stores it only in an encrypted database on the device and ships no advertising or analytics SDKs.
Medication data is not ordinary usage data
With a fitness app, sharing step counts with an ad partner is irritating but rarely consequential. Medication data is different. The active ingredient, the dose and the schedule together often allow a direct inference about a diagnosis — psychiatric medication, HIV treatment, diabetes drugs or fertility treatment are all readily identifiable from a prescription alone.
European regulators treat this accordingly: health data is a special category under Article 9 of the GDPR, with stricter requirements for processing and disclosure than ordinary personal data.
How sharing usually happens
Consumer advocates and data protection authorities have pointed at the same pattern for years: health and wellness apps are among the categories most likely to pass usage data to ad networks, analytics firms or data brokers. It rarely happens through an obvious button. It happens through embedded advertising and analytics libraries that promise personalisation or improved user experience and, in practice, build profiles.
For most users this is invisible during everyday use, and it is disclosed, if at all, deep in terms nobody reads.
What on-device storage actually means
Medifix is built so that no server ever holds a medication list. Every entry — name, dose, schedule, intake history — is written to a local database on the device, encrypted with AES-256 via SQLCipher. There is no advertising SDK, no analytics framework and no tracking library that could forward it.
There is deliberately no cloud backup. If you want a backup, you get an encrypted file written to a folder on your own phone, protected by a PIN you choose. Whether that file ever goes anywhere else is your decision; the app uploads nothing. Data can be exported or deleted entirely at any time without contacting a support team.
The few optional features that do touch a server — caregiver sharing being the main one — are named individually in the privacy policy, and the payload is end-to-end encrypted.
What that looks like in practice
- No advertising or tracking SDKs, and no data passed to third parties.
- Medication data encrypted locally on the device (AES-256), not on a Mintlane server.
- No cloud backup: backups are encrypted files in a folder on your own phone, PIN-protected.
- Export or delete everything yourself, at any time.
- GDPR compliant, with a privacy policy that names each exception individually.
Get Medifix
Medifix is free and available on Google Play and the App Store. Setting up a reliable reminder takes a couple of minutes.
More guides
- Medication reminders that work on silent mode
- Sharing a medication plan with family, safely
- A medication reminder should not be behind a paywall
A full feature overview lives on the Medifix app page, more articles in the Medifix guides, and answers to technical questions in the support section.