Your Therapy Notes Deserve Better Than 'Standard Encryption'

Not all data is created equal. Your grocery list, meeting notes, and workout logs are personal, but your therapy notes and mental health reflections are existential. They contain your deepest vulnerabilities, your trauma, your fears, and your most private self.

Digital privacy discussions often treat all data as "user content" deserving the same standard protections. We believe this is a dangerous oversimplification. Mental health data requires a higher standard or protection—one that goes beyond legal compliance to technically guaranteed privacy.

The Unique Sensitivity of Mental Health Data

When you journal about depression, anxiety, trauma, or relationship struggles, you create data that could effectively be used against you. This information could impact child custody cases, employment opportunities, insurance rates, or social standing if exposed.

But the risk isn't just about public exposure. It's about the subtle violation of being observed when you think you're alone. The therapeutic value of journaling comes from complete uninhibited expression. That expression shuts down when you know—consciously or subconsciously—that an algorithm is reading your words.

The Psychological Cost of Surveillance

Knowing that AI analyzes your entries creates subtle but powerful psychological effects. You might unconsciously phrase things more positively to achieve better mood scores. You might avoid writing about suicidal thoughts because you worry about triggering crisis protocols.

This is the "observer effect" applied to mental health. When you know you're being watched by a system that categorizes and analyzes you, you stop being your authentic self and start performing for the algorithm. This destroys the primary therapeutic benefit of journaling: having a safe, non-judgmental space to just be.

Why "Standard Privacy" Isn't Enough

Most mental health apps use "standard privacy" measures. They encrypt data in transit and at rest. They have privacy policies. They comply with laws like HIPAA or GDPR.

Legal Compliance ≠ Privacy

HIPAA allows data sharing for "healthcare operations," "treatment," and "partners." It does not guarantee that no one sees your data; it regulates who can see it and under what conditions. Legal compliance is a floor, not a ceiling.

The Generative AI Threat

Generative AI poses a new threat. Many apps now send your journal entries to Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate summaries or "insights." Even if anonymized, this data often leaves the app's secure environment and travels to third-party AI providers (like OpenAI or Anthropic).

Once your intimate thoughts are processed by these models, they may be used for training or "service improvement." Your trauma becomes training data. Your private struggles become patterns for an AI to learn from.

Why On-Device Processing Changes Everything

Hello Diary's on-device speech recognition means your voice never leaves your device during transcription. There's no cloud processing. No servers analyze your content. No AI reads your therapy notes.

This technical distinction creates a psychological safety that policy promises cannot match. When you use Hello Diary, you are truly alone with your thoughts. The app is a tool, not an observer. It records what you say but "understands" nothing. It keeps your secrets not because it promised to, but because it was built without the ears to hear them.

The Ethics of Mental Health Tech

Companies building mental health tools have ethical obligations beyond typical consumer apps. When you're asking vulnerable people to share their deepest struggles, you owe them maximum privacy protection—not minimum legal compliance.

We believe ethical mental health tech requires:

• Zero-Knowledge Encryption: The company should technically be unable to read user entries.
• No Behavioral Tracking: The app shouldn't monitor how often or when you journal to maximize engagement.
• No Data Monetization: The business model should safeguard data, not sell it.
• Transparent Architecture: Users should be able to verify how their data is handled.

A Safe Space for Healing

Journaling is a powerful tool for healing. It helps process trauma, clarify thoughts, and manage emotions. But for this tool to work, the space must be safe. Treating therapy notes like standard user data violates that safety.

When we built Hello Diary, we asked: "What would we want for our own therapy notes?" The answer was obvious. We wanted a digital vault that we alone could open. We didn't want 'smart' features that required spying. We didn't want 'insights' that required analysis. We wanted privacy.

Your mental health journey is yours alone. Your notes belong to you. Not to us, not to advertisers, and certainly not to an AI training dataset. That's why we built Hello Diary the way we did.