Smartphone (Android and iOS) applications ("apps") for mental health have a wealth of potential for assisting in monitoring symptoms and progress and increasing access to care. Into these apps, users often enter a plethora of personal information that they may or may not want shared with outside parties. Some apps offer a privacy policy statement disclosing how information entered into the app will be used and shared; however, many apps do not offer such statements. Of the apps that do offer privacy statements, how trustworthy are these claims? Oftentimes, the only source of revenue, aside from subscriptions, is selling users' personal data to third party entities, such as Google and Facebook, so that these third parties can offer targeted advertisement. In this study by Huckvale et al., the authors investigated the privacy policies and actual data sharing among the top-ranked (most popular) apps for depression and smoking cessation (n=36). The researchers found data that is a bit alarming -a large portion of apps offer no adequate privacy disclosure and some of those that do state in their privacy policies that data will not be shared with third parties often have actions that are contradictory to such stated policies (Figure). Given the consequences of having personal mental health data shared (including stigma that may be associated with mental health issues such as depression and smoking cessation), numerous organizations (including the US FDA, the World Health Organization, and the American Psychiatric Association) have declared that app data privacy is of utmost importance; however, as the results from this study show, we have a ways to go before privacy standards in mental health apps are realized.
Reference:
Huckvale K et al. JAMA Netw Open 2019;2(4):e192542. Abstract
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