Legal Safeguards for Digital Socio-Public Health Equity: Ensuring Privacy, Consent, and Justice in a Connected Age

The rapid expansion of digital health systems, spanning electronic health records (EHRs), artificial intelligence (AI), mobile health (mhealth) platforms, and large-scale data infrastructures, offers unprecedented opportunities to advance public health, yet it simultaneously introduces complex legal, ethical, and equity challenges. This chapter provided an analysis of the legal safeguards required to ensure that digital health technologies (DHTs) uphold human rights, promote equity, and prevent discriminatory impacts. The foundational concepts of privacy and confidentiality under global regimes were examined, highlighting persistent risks of reidentification in large datasets and the tensions between data utility and individual rights. Informed consent limitations in population health was evaluated alongside emerging alternatives, including broad, dynamic, opt-out, and community consent models. Data governance architectures, such as centralized, federated, and hybrid was analyzed, stressing the importance of stewardship, cross-border safeguards, and equitable data-sharing mechanisms. The role of algorithmic fairness was interrogated through evidence of bias in risk prediction and resource allocation systems, emphasizing the need for robust accountability, transparency requirements, algorithmic audits, and contestability rights. Additionally, the chapter assessed privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as differential privacy, secure multiparty computation, and synthetic data, and their legal fit within regulatory frameworks. It outlined the essential transparency, oversight, and remedy mechanisms needed for trustworthy digital health ecosystems, including supervisory authorities, public reporting tools, and judicial review. A model legal provision and a phased policy roadmap is proposed which should emphasize a rights-based, multisector strategy to achieve equitable, accountable, and human-centered digital public health systems.