When nurse practitioner Jennifer Kamrass used the Talkspace app to process the stress of being terminated while being nine months pregnant, she had no idea her messages would later be subpoenaed by her former employer's legal team and used against her.
Behind the scenes, Talkspace has quietly amassed one of the largest mental health databases in the world and the 140 million messages are now being used to train an AI therapy chatbot. Talkspace claims the data is anonymised, however, privacy experts warn that anonymised data can be re-identified. With the current AI age HIPAA alone is not adequate protection.
Psychologist Linda Michaels, co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network, called the data mining "awful," - unlike traditional therapy where the therapist writes a couple of lines of personal notes, apps like Talkspace create a verbatim transcript of everything disclosed.
