Woebot learns sensitive user data, draws investors
A Facebook message pops up on my phone screen. “What’s going on in your world?”
It’s from a robot named Woebot, the brainchild of Stanford University psychologist Alison Darcy.
Woebot seems to care about me. The app asks me for a list of my strengths, and remembers my response so it can encourage me later. It helps me set a goal for the week — being more productive at work. It asks me about my moods and my energy levels and makes charts of them.
“I’ll help you recognize patterns because … [no offense] humans aren’t great at that,” Woebot tells me with a smirking smile emoji.
So Woebot knows that I felt anxious on Wednesday and happy on Thursday. But who else might know? Unlike a pedometer, which tracks something as impersonal as footsteps, many mental-health apps in development rely on gathering and analyzing information about a user’s intimate feelings and social life.
“Mental health data is some of the most intimate data there can be,” said Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Chatbots have existed since the 1960s — one was named after Pygmalion heroine Eliza Doolittle — but advances such as machine learning have made the robots savvier. Woebot is one of an emerging group of technological interventions that aim to detect and treat mental-health disorders.
Clinicians and privacy experts are welcoming these inventions with one hand while holding up warning signs with the other. Technology might be a powerful tool to improve treatment, but an emotional problem, if it becomes known, can affect insurance coverage, ruin chances of landing a job or color an employer’s perception.
Privacy concerns aside, the promise of collecting data is the ability to render a holistic picture of a person’s mental state that’s more accurate than infrequent assessments conducted in a doctor’s office.
Woebot has data that suggests a benefit. In a study of 70 people ages 18 to 28, scores measuring depression were significantly decreased in the group that chatted with Woebot compared with those who read a National Institutes of Mental Health ebook.
Darcy promises Woebot won’t sell customer information and the company’s employees only view anonymized responses. But the app works on Facebook Messenger, and Darcy concedes that she can’t vouch for how Facebook will use the data.
Facebook says it collects information including when users “message or communicate with others” in order to “provide, improve and develop services.” Spokeswoman Jennifer Hakes said Messenger abides by Facebook’s data policy, but “we do not read the content of messages between people or people and businesses.”
Investors don’t seem inhibited by privacy concerns. Mindstrong has raised $14 million in a series A funding round, including from an investment arm of insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc.