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Is Your Therapist Selling Your Secrets?
A class action lawsuit against BetterHelp asks, "Who are they really helping?"
2024-05-09T11:44-07:00
When an email promising a refund for BetterHelp arrived in my inbox this week, I thought it was another scam. Advertisements for this online therapy service are now everywhere, and almost overnight it has become the go-to site for addressing mental health issues from home. Even though I no longer use this service, the meteoric rise of such an acclaimed company had me doubting any refund.
Was this a phishing scam for my bank info? The links looked suspicious until I noticed they went to the Federal Trade Commission’s website. It turns out this was a real class action lawsuit, and BetterHelp was now the one getting analyzed.
According to that email, “The FTC says that BetterHelp promised to keep users’ information private but revealed data to Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo for advertising purposes. This data included email addresses, IP addresses, and personal answers to health questions.”
Has the line between big data and privacy dissolved completely? This week I also happened to start William Ammerman’s The Invisible Brand, a book about psychological manipulation through AI-powered marketing. It’s about as old as my defunct BetterHelp subscription, and by now we all know that companies data farm our page visits and clicks. However, using therapy notes for marketing purposes is an all-time low.
Let’s get a little more context to underscore the absurdity of this situation. Over a decade ago Showtime debuted a show called Web Therapy starring Lisa Kudrow. The series had audiences laughing at a self-absorbed, waspy psychologist offering her lackluster services online. Her bumbling webcam sessions painted web therapy as a complete joke that violated the internet’s cardinal rule: don’t tell your secrets online.
BetterHelp changed all that. A few years after the show ended and well before the pandemic made working from home the new normal, people were starting to praise online therapy. Its convenience outweighed any digital privacy concerns.
A friend recommended I check it out during my tough breakup in 2019, so I turned to Pride Counseling, a subsidiary of BetterHelp, for some mental health support. Soon I was sharing intimate details about my fears and desires to a complete stranger assigned to me by an algorithm. This therapist would respond to my worries with generic self-soothing techniques that didn’t impress me. Even though Showtime canceled Web Therapy long ago, I somehow felt like I was its new guest star.
I’m sure BetterHelp has benefitted many people, but I ended up finding the experience too intangible to grasp. I needed in-person attention and the pressure of a commute to stick to these medical appointments, and my lack of online commitment frustrated my therapist. He soon dropped me as a client – which didn’t help my abandonment issues – but despite not having the best time, I didn’t expect a class action lawsuit. It never occurred to me that BetterHelp might hand my data over to advertising companies.
My journey with web therapy cost me $180 a month, and I stuck with it for a few. Now they’re offering me a whopping $9.72 in compensation. It’s a weak apology for giving my deepest secrets to marketing tech’s master manipulators.
Something tells me BetterHelp will weather this storm. Not long after looking into my refund, another email appeared from an affiliate telling me about the wonders of BetterHelp. They said it would boost my workplace productivity, yet said nothing about it boosting my online shopping cart.