BetterHelp sold your intake form to Facebook and called it industry standard

Never thought about this until recently, but before you tell an app your worst stuff, the most useful question might not be "does it work" but "who does the company answer to."

A company that took venture money owes its investors a large exit. Not because the founders are evil, it's just the deal they signed. Growth targets don't care that your product happens to hold people's most intimate thoughts. A bootstrapped company answers to its customers, mostly because it has no one else to answer to. Neither model makes anyone a saint, but they pull in different directions when money gets tight.

And we've seen what the pull looks like. The FTC fined BetterHelp $7.8m for sharing users' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire answers with Facebook, Snapchat, and others for advertising, after promising that data would stay private. BetterHelp called it industry-standard practice and admitted no wrongdoing. Industry-standard is the part that should bother you. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiFederal Trade Commission

To complicate my own point, Finch registered as a public benefit corporation, which legally lets it weigh users against profit. Whether that's protection or branding, I honestly don't know.

So now I look up funding before I look up features. Weird filter for picking a mental health tool, but here we are. Does anyone here actually check this stuff before downloading?