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
and especially mental health data-is some of the most valuable, and controversial. (via @Jezebel) https://jezebel.com/... Laura G. Hoffman / @lgh_dc : “[As soon as we downloaded the app], Better Help began to silently slip data to dozens of third parties” like Facebook, Google, Snapchat & Pinterest. FB was alerted every time the app was opened & received metadata from every message sent to the therapist during during a session. 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/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Jezebel investigation extends a pattern documented since 2019, when the Wall Street Journal found popular apps funneling sensitive signals like heart rates and pregnancy intent to Facebook through its analytics SDK — here the same pipeline carries therapy-session metadata instead. The reporting shows BetterHelp alerting Facebook on every app open, sending message metadata to third parties, and routing intake responses about suicidal thoughts to MixPanel, with Google, Snapchat, and Pinterest also in the data flow.
The piece matters because it lands on a regulatory blind spot: as the article notes via Laura G. Hoffman, HIPAA was built for anonymizing paperwork, not app telemetry, leaving mental-health app users outside its protections. The arc runs through a Talkspace whistleblower report on fake reviews and privacy lapses later the same year, researchers finding 33 of 36 mental-health apps sharing data, and ultimately Teladoc's $7.8M FTC settlement over BetterHelp's ad-data sharing — making this 2020 story an early marker of the enforcement wave.
First-order effects
- BetterHelp users' most sensitive disclosures — suicidal-thoughts intake responses and therapist-message metadata — are flowing to MixPanel, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Pinterest without those users' meaningful knowledge.
- Facebook and the other ad platforms receive event-level signals from a mental-health service, putting them in possession of data their own policies and public positions on sensitive categories say they should not hold.
Second-order effects
- Rival therapy platforms like Talkspace face the same scrutiny, and the category's privacy practices become a competitive liability once regulators and journalists treat app-based therapy as a data-harvesting business.
- Ad platforms are forced into defensive positions — tightening SDK rules and sensitive-category restrictions — as each exposé raises the cost of hosting mental-health data in ad pipelines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app-based mental health gets pulled toward explicit regulation or platform-level data restrictions, closing the HIPAA gap that currently lets therapy apps operate outside medical privacy law — a shift foreshadowed by the FTC's later action against Teladoc.
- Mental-health data becomes a recognized broker commodity in its own right, with downstream markets for app-derived health signals eventually drawing their own enforcement and legislative attention.
The trend: Consumer mental-health apps are being forced from an unregulated data-sharing norm toward medical-grade privacy expectations, with regulators and ad platforms — not HIPAA — setting the new boundary.