Lumosity: a warning to users (2009)

In fact, there is a mountain of evidence (and growing every day) which shows that you can improve your brain health by getting up from your chair and doing any sort of physical activity.

Even getting up and lifting one leg leaving your to balance your weight on the other does more for your brain than sitting down and doing a mental puzzle or cross-word, etc.

Just a thought :)

But, alas, in today's market, this is completely unsurprising.

I did particularly like this line at the end (unrelated to the issue at hand, instead in a section questioning Lumosity's effectiveness): "Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist. But I do know statistics."

I think the most profitable use of this data wouldn't be selling to recruiters, but perhaps to note that Mary and Ben are 67, married and Mary's performance on the exercises suggests accelerating dementia.

Medical practices, particularly questionable ones [1] would froth at the mouth to have a lead on a guy who's ready to spend anything to have his wife back. Insurance companies probably wouldn't mind a peek either.

As Lumosity makes all claps clear in the TOS [2] they're not a medical service so I wouldn't imagine they'd be bound by any of the protections which apply to actual medical records.

1: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/enbrel-for-stroke-and-al...

2: http://www.lumosity.com/legal/terms_of_service

Now, it's possible that the "delete account" button disappears when you purchase (I don't know?), but that's why they have customer service who have that ability. It may just be a customer retention or security policy to require a human interfering to start the deletion process.

Additionally, at present, if you read their blogs, and the HCP site, you will see that they use your data, without PII, to be part of larger research studies to determine cognitive abilities of people of all walks of life. Researchers use the platform for studies, and can compare active participants against years of historical data in Lumosity's database.

Mental performance information is as private as it gets.

While this post is from years ago, it is very relevant today; Lumosity has been incessantly advertising through NPR and I was actually thinking looking into them.

I had hopes that perhaps this is for pay app and was considering how to handle app privacy. Clearly not going to happen.

an interesting case of 'who owns what' in terms of user data. You created the data - does that mean you own it? does it mean you should have a right to delete all record of you or that data for a service?