Singh Swarndeep, Sharma Pawan, Ghimire Pratistha, Shrestha Roshan, Gnanavel Sundar
Dept. of Psychiatry, Government Medical College & Hospital, Chandigarh, India.
Dept. of Psychiatry, Patan Academy of Health Sciences, School of Medicine, Lalitpur, Nepal.
Indian J Psychol Med. 2023 Mar;45(2):173-178. doi: 10.1177/02537176221142046. Epub 2023 Jan 14.
Mental Health apps (MH apps) could help address the huge unmet mental health care need of developing countries. This study aimed to explore potential ethical, data safety, and privacy issues associated with using MH apps for depression.
A cross-sectional assessment of the top 50 MH apps (by Google Play store search result ordering) for depression available in India was conducted in November 2021.
Most apps were listed under the category of health and fitness (54%). The median number of total and dangerous permissions requested at the time of download was nine and three, respectively. Privacy policy in English was available for 76%. The average length of the privacy policy was 2171 words, and the mean Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level was 12 (much higher than the recommended cut-off of eight). Important features relevant to safeguarding consumer confidentiality, including names of third parties with which user data could be shared (42%), explicit consent before sharing data with third parties (16%), and assurance regarding the collection of de-identifiable data (11%), were missing from the majority of privacy policies.
There is an urgent need to improve the accessibility and usability of privacy policies by app developers, with the active involvement of other stakeholders.
心理健康应用程序（MH应用程序）有助于满足发展中国家巨大的未得到满足的心理健康护理需求。本研究旨在探讨使用MH应用程序治疗抑郁症相关的潜在伦理、数据安全和隐私问题。
2021年11月，对印度谷歌应用商店搜索结果排名前50的治疗抑郁症的MH应用程序进行了横断面评估。
大多数应用程序被归类为健康与健身类（54%）。下载时请求的总权限和危险权限的中位数分别为9个和3个。76%的应用程序提供了英文隐私政策。隐私政策的平均长度为2171个单词，平均弗莱什-金凯德阅读年级水平为12级（远高于建议的8级临界值）。大多数隐私政策缺少与保护消费者机密性相关的重要功能，包括可能共享用户数据的第三方名称（42%）、在与第三方共享数据之前的明确同意（16%）以及关于收集可去识别数据的保证（11%）。
在其他利益相关者的积极参与下，应用程序开发者迫切需要提高隐私政策的可及性和可用性。
