What's on Your Mind? Exploring Privacy of Mental Health Apps

[2605.02016] What's on Your Mind? Exploring Privacy of Mental Health Apps Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2605.02016 (cs) [Submitted on 3 May 2026 ( v1 ), last revised 28 Aug 2026 (this version, v4)] Title: What's on Your Mind? Exploring Privacy of Mental Health Apps Authors: Chloe Georgiou , Hans Lu , Emiliano De Cristofaro , Gene Tsudik View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Therapy and life-coaching apps have grown rapidly in number, variety, and popularity. At the same time, their users often share highly sensitive and personal information, including mental health issues, trauma experiences, fantasies, desires, and relationship difficulties. This prompts the need to examine privacy practices across the ecosystem. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of a corpus of 25 popular Android mental health and life-coaching apps, such as Replika and Headspace. It builds on static analysis and dynamic network traffic analysis, coupled with identifying gaps between each app's observed behavior and its privacy policies. Our analysis highlights serious concerns and substantial transparency gaps. First, every app in our corpus embeds at least one tracker SDK not named in its privacy policy, and 85\% of the apps we instrument fail to disclose at least half of the trackers detected in their APKs. Second, more than half of the apps declare several dangerous permissions without corresponding privacy-policy disclosures, including camera or microphone permissions. Third, nearly half the apps disclose third-party AI processing (e.g., via OpenAI, Anthropic, and Groq) in their privacy policies, while several use only generic language (e.g., "AI services"), failing to identify which company receives user data. Overall, our results show that current disclosure practices fall short of the transparency needed for meaningful informed consent. We argue for a significantly updated regulatory framework for therapy apps that more closely aligns with the professional and ethical standards that bind licensed human therapists. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ; Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2605.02016 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2605.02016v4 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.02016 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Emiliano De Cristofaro [ view email ] [v1] Sun, 3 May 2026 18:42:08 UTC (153 KB) [v2] Sun, 10 May 2026 19:30:35 UTC (153 KB) [v3] Sat, 30 May 2026 00:54:14 UTC (153 KB) [v4] Fri, 28 Aug 2026 03:49:19 UTC (439 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Additional Features Audio Summary Current browse context: cs.CR < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations SciX Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab)

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