Purpose – Health data is considered sensitive personal data, which carries a high risk to the individual’s privacy. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that users of health services are adequately informed of privacy practices to be able to make informed privacy decisions. The study aims to assess the privacy policies of health applications in India. The global principle and requirement of transparency under data protection law in the EU is used to understand where privacy policies are lacking and suggest how privacy policies can improve.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper understands transparency through an interpretative legal analysis considering three different approaches. One approach is to consider different peoples’ behaviour based on how they perceive privacy. Here, the paper relies on Westin’s privacy categorisation. The second is to consider the transparency requirement in Article 13 of the EU GDPR, which lays down the different kinds of information that must be provided in privacy policies. Lastly, the general principle of transparency is considered to ensure that the manner of providing information helps achieve transparency.

Findings – The overall synthesis of the legal framework, the interpretive guidelines shared by Article 29 Working Party, the privacy attitude framework by Westin and constructive arrangement of several of the relevant literatures helps propose a scale for assessing transparency. The paper finds that privacy policies of health services in India are lacking on several of the parameters of the proposed scale. The paper also suggests how privacy policies should be designed to overcome the identified limitations and to better meet the scale.

Originality/value – This paper develops a unique scale to assess privacy policies. This scale can be used to draft and design privacy policies of health services in India. Since the scale is based on the GDPR global benchmark, the scale can be used for assessing and designing privacy policies in India and globally in various sectors, including health and others.