Mental Health Apps Are Failing Us — Here’s How to Fix Them
Last Updated on December 10, 2024 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Mukundan Sankar
Originally published on Towards AI.
Federated Learning Is the Key to Smarter, Safer Solutions
This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.
Mental health apps are everywhere these days. They promise to track your moods, give you therapy exercises, and even predict your stress levels before you feel them yourself. It’s an incredible technology — but it comes with a problem: privacy.
Let’s be real. Nobody likes the idea of their deepest fears, thoughts, or vulnerabilities sitting on a company’s server. You might trust the app today, but what about tomorrow? A data breach, a poorly thought-out partnership, or an inevitable shift in priorities could mean your private life becomes a statistic — or worse, public.
The thing is, these apps genuinely need data to help you. Without it, they can’t improve or make personalized recommendations. So, they collect your data — because how else are they going to get smarter?
But here’s a crazy thought: What if they didn’t need your data at all?
Federated learning (FL) is an idea, a machine learning model, that flips the entire system on its head. Instead of collecting all your data in one place, FL keeps your data where it… Read the full blog for free on Medium.
Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.
Published via Towards AI
Towards AI Academy
We Build Enterprise-Grade AI. We'll Teach You to Master It Too.
15 engineers. 100,000+ students. Towards AI Academy teaches what actually survives production.
Start free — no commitment:
→ 6-Day Agentic AI Engineering Email Guide — one practical lesson per day
→ Agents Architecture Cheatsheet — 3 years of architecture decisions in 6 pages
Our courses:
→ AI Engineering Certification — 90+ lessons from project selection to deployed product. The most comprehensive practical LLM course out there.
→ Agent Engineering Course — Hands on with production agent architectures, memory, routing, and eval frameworks — built from real enterprise engagements.
→ AI for Work — Understand, evaluate, and apply AI for complex work tasks.
Note: Article content contains the views of the contributing authors and not Towards AI.
Related posts
Recent Posts
