Researchers: 33 of 36 apps for depression or smoking cessation shared data with third-parties and 2 apps shared very sensitive info, like health diary entries
‘Do I trust the person who made the app, and do I understand where this data is going?’ — Free apps marketed to people …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 finding lands in a decade-long pattern of health-app data leakage: an earlier survey of popular apps already showed personal information like email and location flowing to Apple, Google, and other third parties, and the candor people show health apps — often more honest than with doctors — is exactly what makes the exposure valuable. What is new here is the specificity: 33 of 36 apps aimed at people managing depression or quitting smoking shared data, and two passed along diary-level disclosures.
The downstream market for that data has since become visible. Coverage of therapy apps like Better Help notifying third parties when an app is opened — even about suicidal thoughts (Jezebel's look at therapy-app data sharing) — and a later study finding 11 data brokers selling Americans' mental health data, likely sourced from app makers, trace the pipeline this study documents at its origin.
First-order effects
- Users of free depression and smoking-cessation apps are the immediate affected party: their disclosures, including in two cases health diary entries, move to third parties without a clinical confidentiality relationship protecting them.
Second-order effects
- The app-to-broker supply chain hardens into a market — the same flow documented here resurfaces as brokers packaging antidepressant and insomnia data for sale, giving advertisers a product no regulated channel could offer.
Third-order effects
- Because most consumer wellness apps sit outside HIPAA's perimeter, repeated studies like this one push regulators toward treating behavioral-health data flows as a consumer-protection problem rather than a privacy-policy footnote — the gap between what users tell an app and who may lawfully buy it becomes the contested terrain.
The trend: Consumer mental-health apps are functioning as unregulated data collection endpoints, feeding a broker market that formalizes what began as routine SDK data sharing.