Please watch the brief video above about how the online mental health company Talkspace, which has a $26M contract with the NYC Department of Health, continues to share NYC teen data with ad trackers and social media companies — the very same companies NYC is suing for undermining their mental health. This is despite our repeated letters to the Department of Health, raising our privacy concerns starting last September.
Also, check out this recent piece in Gizmodo, that reports that now Seattle and Baltimore schools also have similar contracts with Talkspace to provide free mental health to teens, with likely similar data privacy violations.
Moreover, as the Gizmodo article revealed, Talkspace is now developing a “Personalized Podcast” created through AI, that harvests patients’ personal mental health info from their therapy sessions and feeds it back to them in the form of a sound file. One can only imagine the damage this could cause to vulnerable teens if someone got hold of the sound files on their phones or they themselves played them back inadvertently in public. Not even considering how the use of AI chatbots can itself be perilous, as shown by the recent lawsuit filed by parents who allege that a chatbot caused their son to commit suicide.
One clarification: though the Gizmodo article notes that after we brought attention to this issue, ad-trackers were removed from the NYC Teenspace landing page, we found many other pages on its website are still collecting and disclosing teens’ personal data, as our video explains above, including the page featuring the new supposedly improved Teenspace Privacy Policy. We wrote about our findings in our most recent letter sent to the NYC Department of Health more than a month ago, and yet have gotten no response.
Parents: If your child has visited the Teenspace website or has signed up for their services, please contact us at [email protected] as soon as possible.
