Mental health has never enjoyed the same level of recognition and support as other areas of health. Culturally and for a long time It was a huge taboo that was not talked about and that carried a gigantic stigma. From schizophrenia to depression, suffering from this type of illness and disorder has long been associated with the bonus of having to hide it as a self-protection measure.

Although we still have a long way to go, Fortunately, the stigma is gradually easingso we can expect that in the medium term, mental health will not be associated with dozens of labels, and a fairly clear signal in this regard can be found in the expansion of mental health applications, applications related to services are one way or another and contribute to the necessary standardization.

However, the bad news is that this type of application could compromise the privacy of its users, according to a study by the Mozilla Foundation, which analyze 32 applications related to mental health concluded that 28 of them do not meet the standards the Foundation decided to consider respecting the privacy of its users on the basis of four criteria:

• What does the company do with user data?
• How the user can control their own data.
• Previous trajectories of the company in terms of user data protection.
• How the company meets Mozilla’s minimum security standards.

The problem is that, as I mentioned at the beginning, mental health is still exposed to considerable stigma in society (fortunately diminishing), so a lack of adherence to security standards may mean that user data who trust these services think that their information stay safe, pThey can be very upset when they see that this is not the case.and that commercial interests outweighed the protection of users’ privacy.

The study analyzes 32 services, all from the United States, so we cannot extrapolate its results to other geographic areas. However, it is important to remember that when choosing a service and / or application related to mental health we need to be especially careful when it comes to checking their privacy policies. And if possible, look for elements that can help us verify their effective compliance.