Bearable

Bearable seems to do a pretty good job taking their users' privacy seriously. This mood and symptom tracking app can collect a lot of personal information if you chose to share it. Things like your email, mood, energy levels and individual symptoms, your medication and supplements, sleep quality, exercise, diet, and daily activities such as work and grocery shopping. That's a lot of personal information. Here's what we like about how Bearable handles all of that data of yours.

First, Bearable says they don't and will never sell your data. Yay! They also say they track as little personally identifiable data as possible to protect users. They purposefully do not ask for information like name, age, and gender. Again, yay! They go on to say they don't process personal data that directly identifies you as a person (such as your first name, surname, email). Good work Bearable, so far so good. Bearable doesn't seem to share personal information with third parties for targeted advertising. Again, good. They do say your health data is encrypted safely and the only personal data attached to it is your email address. And then they say, "your personal profile data (email address) is stored separately from your health (mood, symptoms, medication, your customised health factors) data and your service settings. This allows us to ensure the highest possible level of privacy for your health data. Your password is stored using one-way encryption." Which is a little confusing, because it sounds like your email address is attached to your health data, yet stored separately. Not exactly sure how that works, but it seems OK, we hope.

Unfortunately we couldn't tell if Bearable meets our Minimum Security Standards. We emailed James, the privacy contact listed in Bearable's privacy policy for privacy related questions. Unfortunately, we didn't hear back from James. (Give us a shout James! We'd love to hear from you.) What could happen if something goes wrong? Hopefully not too much. Just make sure to set up a strong password so no one can get into your app and see that you track stuff like how often you fart. That could get embarrassing.