Mental Health Apps: Your Therapy Session Is a Data Product

The app that asked how you were feeling sold that answer to advertisers. Here's the full data trail behind the apps promising to support your mental health. In 2022, the FTC sent civil investigative demands to a set of mental health app companies. The questions the FTC asked were simple: What data do you collect? Who do you share it with? How do you use it? The answers were disturbing enough that several companies settled without full disclosure of what they'd been doing. Better Help — the largest mental health app in the United States with over 3 million users — paid $7.8 million in FTC civil penalties in 2023 after sharing users' private mental health data, including data users provided when signing up for therapy and data that revealed they had sought mental health treatment, with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes. This was not a bug. It was the business model. The HIPAA Gap Why Mental Health Apps Aren't Covered The Health Insurance Portability and A