Superbetter

First reviewed April 20, 2022. Review updated, April 25, 2023

It seems in 2023 SuperBetter's app is "all new," at least according to their website. Their updated privacy policy does still raise some concerns for us. Now SuperBetter says they can use your personal information for marketing purposes, "In order to support the SuperBetter business and provide our users with relevant information regarding the Service and opportunities presented by partners, SuperBetter may use your personal information for marketing the Service."

SuperBetter also says they can collect information about your from other sources and combine that with information they collect on you. That's not uncommon these days. It also does concern us because are they buying data from data brokers to build a bigger profile on you? The way their privacy policy is worded, is seems that could be the case.

All in all, we have to say that SuperBetter's privacy practices feel like they've gotten a little worse since 2022. That's not great, especially for an app targeted at educators and used by young people. SuperBetter isn't bad, it's also not better, and probably a bit worse, in 2023.

Read our 2022 review:

Good news. Superbetter says they will never, ever sell you personal data. Yay! They do share data with third parties for research and advertising purposes, but it seems to be mostly anonymized data, which is generally ok. Although it's been found to be rather easy to de-anonymize some such data. All in all, it's probably OK to gamify your life with Superbetter without worrying too much about losing the privacy game...we hope.

One big thing to consider when using Superbetter is what you share publicly. Superbetter states in their privacy policy, "To protect your privacy, you agree that you will not submit any User Content that contains Personally Identifiable Information (like name, phone number, email address or web site URL) of you or of anyone else." This is a great reminder, anything you share publicly, even your health information, is fair game for anyone to use. One more reminder from Superbetter, things you share on the internet can live on forever. They say, "You should be aware that it is not technologically possible to remove each and every record of the information you have provided to SuperBetter from our servers."

What's the worst that could happen? Well, hopefully not too much. Yeah, you might see some ads targeting you for water bottles to help you drink more water because you use Superbetter. Our biggest worry is we couldn't confirm if Superbetter meets our Minimum Security Standards. We emailed them our privacy questions multiple times at the email listed in their privacy policy for privacy-related questions and didn't get any answers to our questions. So remember as Superbetter says themselves, "there is always some risk that an unauthorized third party may find a way around our security systems or that transmissions of your information over the Internet may be intercepted." Data leaks and hacks happen everyday on the internet folks. Be careful out there.