A Recovery App Should Not Become Another Place You're Afraid to Be Seen
You finally decide to face it. You go looking for help. And the help turns out to be one more place you have to be careful.
One more form asking who you are.
One more app that might remember.
One more account that could leak, or be sold, or be seen.
So you hesitate. Or you give a fake name. Or you close the tab and tell yourself you'll deal with it another day.
This is the quiet failure at the center of a lot of "recovery" technology, and it matters more here than almost anywhere. Because the single thing most likely to get someone to reach for help is the belief that it is safe to be seen reaching. Shame already pushes people to hide, isolate, and struggle in silence. If the tool built to help is one more thing to be careful around, it fails at the one job that mattered before it did anything else.
And the industry's record on this is not good. It is, in places, disgraceful.
In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission ordered the online therapy company BetterHelp to pay $7.8 million and banned it from sharing users' health data for advertising. The company had promised, in plain words, that what you told it would stay private between you and your counselor. Instead it handed users' email addresses, IP addresses, and answers to sensitive mental-health questions to Facebook, Snapchat, and other ad platforms — millions of email addresses, in the case of Facebook alone. The regulator's own summary was blunt: people reached out in a moment of vulnerability, expecting to be protected, and were betrayed for profit.
BetterHelp was not alone, and did not think it was doing anything unusual. The same stretch saw the FTC act against the prescription service GoodRx for similar data-sharing, and one of the year's larger health-data breaches hit another popular mental-health app. Pressed on it, BetterHelp's defense was that sharing this kind of data for advertising is "industry-standard practice."
That is the part to sit with. Not that one company failed — that the failure is normal.
It reaches this corner too. One of the most popular apps for quitting porn leaked the data of hundreds of thousands of its users — their ages, their habits, how they felt — including, reportedly, minors. Then it downplayed it. Separately, research on more than 22,000 pornography sites found that 93% quietly leak data to third parties. The whole environment, from the sites to the tools that promise to save you from them, is watching.
Here is the principle that should be obvious and somehow isn't: with something this private, privacy is not a feature. It is the precondition. An app that leaks what you told it is not a neutral failure — it is worse than no app at all, because it punishes the exact act of reaching for help. It teaches the most vulnerable person in the room that being honest was a mistake.
This is the whole reason Meridin is built the way it is, from the first line of code.
The safest data is the data no one holds. So the private things — what you're struggling with, what you write, what you track — are designed to stay on your device, not on our servers. There is meant to be no database anywhere that can say what any single person is working through. You don't have to hand over your name to begin. There are no ads, and no business model that runs on your attention or your secrets. Discretion here is not a setting you have to go find and switch on. It's the architecture.
We won't pretend to be perfect, and we won't make promises we can't keep. But we can promise this: we are not building one more place you have to be careful.
A recovery app should not become another place you're afraid to be seen.
It should be the one place you finally aren't.
Sources
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission, action against BetterHelp for sharing mental-health data with advertisers (2023)
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission, action against GoodRx for disclosing health data (2023), and reporting on the Cerebral data incident
- Maris, Libert & Henrichsen, Tracking Sex — 93% of pornography sites leak data to third parties (2019)
- Reporting on the data exposure of a major porn-recovery app, including data belonging to minors (2025)