A look at the data sharing practices of therapy apps like Better Help, which notify third parties when an app is opened and if a patient has suicidal thoughts
Starting treatment with Better Help, one of the most prominent “therapy-on-demand” apps to launch over the last few years, is easy, which is more or less the point. Tweets: @dmehro , @dmehro , @ohthatflo , @dmehro , @superamit , @carnage4life , @xoxogossipgita , and @privacyproject Tweets: Dhruv Mehrotra / @dmehro : New from @molly__o and I. Online therapy apps are leaking sensitive mental health data to Facebook, Mixpanel, Pinterest and others. https://jezebel.com/... Dhruv Mehrotra / @dmehro : During a session with a therapist, we found that metadata from every message was sent to Facebook...they knew what time of day we were going to therapy, our approximate location, and how long we were chatting on the app. https://twitter.com/... @ohthatflo : Something to consider as we move forward with tech's involvement in medical data: “HIPAA was developed for anonymizing paperwork transferred between doctors; it's been less useful in determining how medical privacy works in a paperless world.” https://twitter.com/... Dhruv Mehrotra / @dmehro : Here's an example of the type of data that Better Help sends to MixPanel. These are responses from a patient intake form that specifically asks about suicide. https://twitter.com/... Amit superamit Gupta / @superamit : “[Better Help tells] Facebook every time a person talks to their therapist, [and shares] patients' pseudo-anonymous feelings about suicide with an analytics company that helps clients measure how ‘addicted’ users are to an app.” https://jezebel.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : With a strict enough interpretation (I.e. a higher bar than GDPR) I've joked that the media would argue any app or website using analytics like Google Analytics or Flurry is violating privacy. Between this & articles about Ring tech media now doing that🤦🏾♂ ️ https://jezebel.com/... @xoxogossipgita : well!!!!!!!! great to know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! https://jezebel.com/... @privacyproject : “Facebook, for instance, is alerted every time a person opens the app, essentially signaling to the social media company how often we were going to a ‘session’ and when we booked our appointments,” @molly__o and @dmehro write in @Jezebel https://jezebel.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Jezebel investigation extends a paper trail that began with the Wall Street Journal's finding that popular apps pipe sensitive signals to Facebook through its analytics SDK — heart rate, pregnancy intent, home listings viewed (sensitive info flowing to Facebook via its analytics SDK). Reporters Dhruv Mehrotra and Molly Osberg applied that lens to therapy-on-demand apps, finding Better Help pings Facebook on every app open and routes intake responses about suicidal thoughts to Mixpanel.
The piece matters because it names the exact mechanism — session frequency and appointment bookings signaled to ad platforms — that later became an enforcement case: Teladoc Health's $7.8M FTC settlement over sharing BetterHelp data with Meta and Snap. It also landed mid-pattern for the category, alongside reporting that Talkspace staff used burner phones to fake reviews while client privacy went underserved.
First-order effects
- Better Help users' most sensitive disclosures — suicidal-thought intake answers, message metadata, appointment bookings — are flowing to Facebook, Mixpanel, and Pinterest as advertising-grade behavioral data.
- Facebook, Mixpanel, and Pinterest are receiving mental-health signals they can monetize or retain regardless of any clinical confidentiality promise the app made to patients.
Second-order effects
- Rival therapy platforms face the same audit lens: the Talkspace burner-phone and privacy reporting shows competitors' practices becoming part of one category-wide trust problem rather than isolated incidents.
- Downstream, the supply side formalizes — researchers later found eleven data brokers selling Americans' mental-health information, including antidepressant and insomnia data, likely sourced from app makers (data brokers selling mental-health information), turning leaked app data into a standing market.
Third-order effects
- Regulators close the gap between consumer-health apps and clinical privacy rules: the FTC's settlement forcing Teladoc to stop sharing BetterHelp data with Meta and Snap establishes that ad-platform data flows out of therapy apps are enforceable violations, not gray areas.
- If the pattern holds, teletherapy companies must rebuild their analytics stacks around consent and data minimization — trading the growth instrumentation that made 'therapy-on-demand' cheap to scale for compliance costs, and shifting competitive advantage toward platforms that can prove confidentiality.
The trend: Consumer mental-health apps are moving from analytics-fueled growth hacking toward regulated, consent-based data handling, with the FTC converting investigative journalism into enforcement precedent.