Mental health, Praying apps have abysmal privacy protections, report finds

A research team from Mozilla has found that mental health and praying applications have worse privacy protections than other applications, The Verge reported.

Jen Caltrider from the Mozilla research team said in a statement, “The vast majority of mental health and prayer apps are exceptionally creepy, they track, share, and capitalize on users’ most intimate personal thoughts and feelings, like moods, mental state, and biometric data.”

The team analyzed over 32 prayer and mental health-related applications. 29 out of those applications were given a “privacy not included” warning label. The label indicates that the app has minimal to no privacy measures to protect users’ data.

The team said that the applications collect a large amount of personal data and have vague privacy policies.

Most of the apps, despite containing very personal data, let users create account with weak passwords and had poor personal information.

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Better Help, Youper, Woebot, Better Stop Suicide, Pray.com and Talkspace are the apps with the worst privacy practices, the Mozilla team claims. Applications like AI chatbot Woebot collect data about users from their party and also share data with advertisers.

Mozilla team also said that they reached out to all these applications to ask about their opinion but only three of them responded.