NEW video about how NYC Dept of Health is enabling Talkspace to share teen personal data with social media platforms, undermining their mental health

 

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 info@studentprivacymatters.org as soon as possible.

Sign up now to hear about the threat to Student Privacy from the city's irresponsible disclosure of student data including via Teenspace

Please join us to learn about the threats to student privacy from breaches and DOE carelessly sharing personal information with ed tech, AI, charter schools, and other unscrupulous third parties, at this briefing on Wed. October  23 at 7 PM EST; you can register here. Co-sponsored with AQE, Class Size Matters and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

One of the troubling issues we will be talking about is Teenspace.  On Sept. 10, along with NYCLU and AI for Families, NYCLU, PCSP and AI for Families wrote the Mayor, the DOE Chancellor, and the Commissioner of  Health about our deep concerns about the way in which the Privacy Policy of the online mental health company Teenspace discloses the personal information of students to unnamed third parties for marketing purposes in a manner that would be illegal if the contract was signed by the DOE rather than the Dept. of Health. 

The Teenspace parent company, Talkspace, is being paid $26 million over three years by the city to provide free counseling to students, and Mayor Adams, the Department of Health and the DOE have all been aggressively encouraging NYC students to sign up for these services, with no mention of how their personal data could be used for predatory marketing which could further undermine their mental health.   More on this here.

On Sept. 23,  Dept. of Health responded to our letter, arguing that they did not have to abide by the state student privacy law since they were not an education agency, but assuring us that their contract was no less  protective.  On Oct. 8,  we received the Talkspace contract via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The contract did not dispel our concerns.  Since we sent our initial letter, we had discovered that when a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is shared with 15 ad trackers and 34 cookies, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among others, which we saw from using the Blacklight  privacy audit tool. These findings were later confirmed by a security company that does privacy analyses.  These findings are particularly concerning, given how the city is suing many of these companies for undermining children's mental health and designing their algorithms to be addictive for the purposes of targeted advertising .

Our follow-up letter to the Dept. of Health is below, copied to other city officials.  Please join us at our Privacy Forum to hear more about this issue and other ways student data is being breached and purposely disclosed in ways that undermine student privacy.

Letter to the Mayor, Chancellor & Commissioner of Health: serious privacy concerns with the city's promotion of Teenspace online mental health services

  

Last Tuesday, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, NYCLU and AI for Families sent a letter to the Mayor, Chancellor Banks, and the Commissioner of Health, expressing our deep privacy concerns with the city's contract with  Talkspace, and their promotion of their online mental health services for teens, called Teenspace.  Both the Mayor and Chancellor Banks have repeatedly hyped the great quality of these services and encouraged students to sign up, including Banks at a town hall meeting last weekend.  There are also links to Teenspace on the DOE website and on the websites of individual NYC public schools. 

The city is paying $26 million for these services, despite the fact that Teenspace collects a huge amount of very sensitive personal information from students before they even create an account  or are given access the company's privacy policy – and much of this information would be barred from collection by the federal student privacy law PPRA without parental knowledge and opt out, if DOE had contracted for these services rather than the city's Department of Health.  The list of these extremely sensitive questions is included in an appendix to our letter. 

To make things worse, the Teenspace privacy policy says students' personal data can be used for marketing purposes, which would be prohibited by the NY Ed Law 2D, again if the DOE had signed the contract. In 2022, several US Senators wrote to Talkspace, pointing out how the company also appeared to be taking advantage of a “regulatory gray area” in HIPAA, to exploit the data of their clients for profit. 

Especially with all the breaches and misuse of student data by DOE contractors, the privacy of NYC students should be better protected than this. As the letter notes, there has also been widespread consumer complaints about Talkspace’s inadequate counseling services and the overcharging of clients.  Our letter was covered by  Daily News , Chalkbeat , State Scoop  and K12 Dive.

After sending the letter, we additional learned that Talkspace has been sued in California for sharing the personal information of website visitors and those who signed up for accounts with TikTok, including the personal information of minors, only adding to our concerns.