Increasingly common, dedicated mental health apps are disastrous when it comes to data protection. personal dataaccording to a study by the Mozilla Foundation.
To achieve these results, Mozilla teams analyzed how 32 mental health and religion applications manage the sometimes very sensitive data of their users. If the majority of these apps are available on the American market, some are also available in France, like Better Help, Talkspace or Youper.
Disastrous data management
“ When it comes to protecting people’s privacy and security, mental health and prayer apps are worse than any other product category Mozilla researchers have looked at in the past six years. “explains the foundation in its blog post.
Thus, of the 32 applications screened by the researchers, 25 of them do not meet Mozilla’s minimum security standards. These include, but are not limited to, mismanagement or unauthorized sharing and selling of user data, vague data management policies, lack of encryption, weak passwords, and lack of a clear vulnerability management system.
A total of 29 of the applications received the label from Mozilla indicating that data security was not respected dubbed *Privacy Not Included. The foundation has shared the results of its report in a user guide.
Capitalizing on mental health in times of crisis
For example, chatbot Woebot, described as a “personal mental health ally that helps you feel like yourself again,” collects users’ personal data and sells it to third parties for advertising purposes.
” The vast majority of mental health and prayer apps are exceptionally scary. They track, share and exploit users’ innermost thoughts and feelings, such as their moods, mental state and biometric data. Searching for mental health apps is shown to be bad for your mental health as it reveals how careless and cowardly these companies can be with our most intimate personal information. says Jen Caltrider, Head of *Privacy Not Included from Mozilla.
Mental health apps have become widely popular in 2020 as many people have been cut off from the world following the Covid-19 pandemic and follow-ups by professionals have also been slowed down. They address sensitive topics such as depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, eating disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Obviously, these companies wanted to capitalize on this trend. Only two apps on the list, PTSD Coach and Wysa, seem to take data management and user privacy seriously.
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Sources: Mozilla, The Verge, ZDNet
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