Aside from directly harvesting a worryingly high amount of user data, some of these apps also collected data from third parties like Facebook. Data brokers are also taking advantage of the lax security situation, and so are insurance companies. But data privacy is not the only concern here. Mozilla’s research team discovered that some of these mental health apps allowed weak passwords as simple as “1” and “11111111.”
Moodfit, an app that collects data about users’ moods and any symptoms related to mental health issues, allowed users to set single-digit or single-letter passwords. There was also little information on how some of the analyzed apps handled vulnerabilities, whether their security updates were delivered in a timely manner — or if they planned on issuing security updates at all. Another concern is transparency, or the lack of it, as a majority of app developers didn’t respond to requests about security or privacy when Mozilla’s team attempted to make contact over the course of their research.
Further complicating the situation are the privacy policies of these apps, which are classified as “incredibly vague and messy.” It’s fairly standard practice for shady apps to use privacy policies that are essentially tall walls of text masquerading as barely comprehensible privacy disclosures in a bid to dissuade users from reading them, let alone discover phrasing that would raise red flags. The entire list of problematic mental health apps assessed by Mozilla can be found here, alongside full details of their data harvesting and handling procedures.
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