Is it safe to tell an AI your problems?

It can be, if you know where your words go. What you type into an AI app is stored somewhere, and depending on the app it might be used to train AI models, shared with advertisers, or kept long after you've forgotten it. None of that is obvious from the chat window. The good news is that five questions tell you most of what you need to know, and a good app answers all of them in plain language.

Health privacy law probably doesn't cover it

A lot of people assume what they tell a mental health app is protected like what they tell a doctor. Usually it isn't. HIPAA, the US health privacy law, covers doctors, health plans and the companies working for them. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, it generally doesn't protect what you enter into apps for your own use, unless the app came from your provider or health plan.

That gap has been abused. When Mozilla's privacy researchers reviewed 32 mental health and prayer apps in 2022, 28 of them earned the group's privacy warning label, and Mozilla called the category worse than any other it had reviewed in six years. In 2023, one online therapy company agreed to pay $7.8 million in an FTC settlement after the agency said it had shared people's email addresses and answers to its health questionnaire with advertising platforms, despite promising not to.

There's no legal confidentiality for AI chats either. OpenAI's CEO said in 2025 that his company could be required to produce those conversations in a lawsuit. That's true of any AI chat today, not just one company's.

Five questions to ask any app

1. Are my chats used to train AI? Some general chatbots use your conversations to improve their models by default, and you have to find the setting to turn it off. Look for a clear yes or no.
2. Are they shared or sold for ads? The answer should be a flat no, in the privacy policy, in those words. "We may share data with partners" isn't a no.
3. Are they encrypted when they're stored? Encryption in transit (the padlock in your browser) is standard. What matters more is whether your conversations are encrypted where they're saved, so someone looking at the database sees scrambled text.
4. Can I delete everything, myself? You should be able to delete your account and its contents from inside the app, without emailing anyone and waiting.
5. What do they need to know about me? An email to sign in is normal. Your full legal name, phone number, contacts and location usually aren't needed for a chat.

Private isn't the same as anonymous

Anonymous means nobody can tell the conversation is yours. Private means it's tied to your account, but protected. Almost any app that saves your history so you can come back to it is private rather than anonymous, because it needs to know which chats are yours.

For most people private is what they actually want: you can pick up where you left off on any device, and nobody else gets to read it.

What to leave out, whatever app you use

• Other people's full names and details. "My sister" works as well as her name.
• Addresses, account numbers and passwords. No support conversation needs them.
• Anything you'd hate to see in a court filing, given that no AI chat has legal privilege today.

That still leaves everything that matters: how you feel, what happened, what you're scared of.

How Moodu answers the five questions

Here's how Moodu handles each one, in plain words:

• Ads: your conversations, mood check-ins and notes are never sold and never used for advertising.
• Encryption: everything you write is encrypted before it's saved, with a separate key for each account.
• Deleting: you can delete your account and everything in it from Settings. Deleting your account also deletes its key, so even a backup copy can't be opened.
• What it needs: an email for a one-time sign-in code, so there's no password to leak, and a first name or nickname to call you.
• Voice: if you talk instead of typing, the recording is turned into text and the audio isn't kept.

Moodu is private, not anonymous, for the reason above: it saves your chats so you can come back to them. It's $39.99 a year after a 3-day free trial, or $4.99 a week. The details are in the Privacy Policy, and there's more on how Moodu is built in how Moodu protects you. If you're weighing which kind of AI to talk to in the first place, read is there an AI that does therapy.