Education Colleges want freshmen to use mental health apps. But are they risking students’ privacy? By  Deanna Paul Jan. 2, 2020 at 3:34 p.m. EST As director of the University of Florida’s Counseling and Wellness Center, Sherry Benton could never keep up with the student demand for services. Adding three new positions bought the center only two waitlist-free weeks. Knowing the school could never hire its way out of the resource shortage, she and Bob Clark, a seasoned software developer and veteran health-care executive, created a wellness and mental health app for students. TAO Connect is just one of dozens of mental health apps permeating college campuses in recent years. In addition to increasing the bandwidth of college counseling centers, the apps offer information and resources on mental health issues and wellness. But as student demand for mental health services grows, and more colleges turn to digital platforms, experts say universities must begin to consider their role as stewards of sensitive student information and the consequences of encouraging or mandating these technologies. The rise in student wellness applications arrives as mental health problems among college students have dramatically increased. Three out of 5 U.S. college students experience overwhelming anxiety, and 2 in 5 students reported debilitating depression, according to a 2018 survey from the American College Health Association. Even so, only about 15 percent of undergraduates seek help at a university counseling center. These apps have begun to fill students’ needs by providing ongoing access to traditional mental health services without barriers such as counselor availability or stigma. Universities license the TAO Connect software and customize the experience by selecting from a curated store of options: It offers hundreds of videos, several hundred interactive exercises, a mindfulness library, self-assessments and logs to practice new skills. Now on more than 150 college campuses, incoming freshmen are encouraged to download the app. At many schools, first-year students are also required to sign up for various online services. Some university clients also incorporate modules — like a seven-part resilience course — into their core curriculum, and others have opted to use the platform’s units on anger management, communication skills and substance abuse in student discipline and conflict resolution. To many, the growing prevalence of mental health apps for young students, a generation for whom digital technology is the norm, makes sense. “If someone wants help, they don’t care how they get that help,” said Lynn E. Linde, chief knowledge and learning officer for the American Counseling Association. “They aren’t looking at whether this person is adequately credentialed and are they protecting my rights. They just want help immediately.” Yet she worried that students may be giving up more information than they realize and about the level of coercion a school.

1. Education
Colleges want freshmen to use mental health apps. But are they
risking students’ privacy?
By
Deanna Paul
Jan. 2, 2020 at 3:34 p.m. EST
As director of the University of Florida’s Counseling and
Wellness Center, Sherry Benton could never keep up with the
student demand for services. Adding three new positions bought
the center only two waitlist-free weeks. Knowing the school
could never hire its way out of the resource shortage, she and
Bob Clark, a seasoned software developer and veteran health-
care executive, created a wellness and mental health app for
students.
TAO Connect is just one of dozens of mental health apps
permeating college campuses in recent years. In addition to
increasing the bandwidth of college counseling centers, the apps
offer information and resources on mental health issues and
wellness. But as student demand for mental health services
grows, and more colleges turn to digital platforms, experts say
universities must begin to consider their role as stewards of
sensitive student information and the consequences of
encouraging or mandating these technologies.
The rise in student wellness applications arrives as mental
health problems among college students have dramatically
increased. Three out of 5 U.S. college students experience
overwhelming anxiety, and 2 in 5 students reported debilitating
depression, according to a 2018 survey from the American
College Health Association.

2. Even so, only about 15 percent of undergraduates seek help at a
university counseling center. These apps have begun to fill
students’ needs by providing ongoing access to traditional
mental health services without barriers such as counselor
availability or stigma.
Universities license the TAO Connect software and customize
the experience by selecting from a curated store of options: It
offers hundreds of videos, several hundred interactive exercises,
a mindfulness library, self-assessments and logs to practice new
skills.
Now on more than 150 college campuses, incoming freshmen
are encouraged to download the app. At many schools, first-year
students are also required to sign up for various online services.
Some university clients also incorporate modules — like a
seven-part resilience course — into their core curriculum, and
others have opted to use the platform’s units on anger
management, communication skills and substance abuse in
student discipline and conflict resolution.
To many, the growing prevalence of mental health apps for
young students, a generation for whom digital technology is the
norm, makes sense.
“If someone wants help, they don’t care how they get that help,”
said Lynn E. Linde, chief knowledge and learning officer for
the American Counseling Association. “They aren’t looking at
whether this person is adequately credentialed and are they
protecting my rights. They just want help immediately.”
Yet she worried that students may be giving up more
information than they realize and about the level of coercion a
school can exert by requiring students to accept terms of service
they otherwise wouldn’t agree to.
“Millennials understand that with the use of their apps they’re
giving up privacy rights. They don’t think to question it,” Linde

3. said.
YOU at College, another student wellness application, is also
advertised as specifically benefiting freshmen, who are making
a transition away from home for the first time.
The software, developed in 2014 by Joe Conrad, chief executive
of Grit Digital Health, approached the growing demand for
services by acknowledging mental health issues as a common
part of the college experience. “We’ve hid the vegetable around
those issues and surrounded them with other content on
academics and success, purpose and meaning and social
connections,” Conrad said.
Now on 55 private and public college campuses, with 40,000
accounts, the platform is introduced during new-student
orientation, where freshmen can create a profile that acts as a
personalized well-being website throughout the four-year
schooling experience.
Mental health apps thrive on data; the more an app learns about
a user, the more it can customize the experience.
Often, these apps measure student progress with routine
assessments that prompt students to track their thoughts,
physical activity, diet and symptoms. Some evaluations ask
about dating life, alcohol consumption and illegal drug use.
Others, like YOU at College’s 18-question “reality check,”
cover topics including stress and anxiety, friend networks and
sleep patterns. Once the reality checks are completed, students
receive report cards and suggested content in areas where they
could improve.
Last year, the Institute for Science, Law and Technology
analyzed the privacy policies and permissions of hundreds of
mobile medical apps. It found that only 38 percent had privacy
policies pre-download, so consumers couldn’t determine what

4. was going to happen with their information. The available
policies were often difficult to locate and challenging to
understand.
Many terms of service stated the policy could change at any
time without notice to the user or included a catchall provision
that said the company would make every attempt to be
compliant with Health Information Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) but didn’t guarantee information
privacy.
“By agreeing to use those platforms, you were essentially
relinquishing privacy rights,” said Lori Andrews, director of the
Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology
and an internationally recognized expert on emerging
technologies.
In addition to privacy policies, many apps have permissions that
are granted to a developer when downloaded to a cellphone.
These can authorize access to sensitive information, such as
location tracking, audio and phone contacts, which can be
shared with aggregators or sold to third parties.
Many apps also failed to fulfill promises: Of the apps that were
supposed to warn about lethal drug interactions, 67 percent
failed to recognize when researchers input a fatal combination,
according to the study. One app asked for access to contacts and
the phone’s microphone, so it could call a loved one if the user
hadn’t left his or her room for an extended period.
“We left the app running for a month. It took all the information
for marketing purposes but didn’t call any loved one,” Andrews
said.
In traditional medical settings, there are robust privacy
protections for personal health information. Universities that
receive federal funding are also subject to laws that protect the

5. privacy of some educational records.
Mental health apps recommended or required by colleges ought
to sit at the intersection of HIPAA and Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), though oftentimes they don’t.
Even where developers claim to be compliant, the law is
relevant only when information is in the hands of a health-care
provider, medical institution or covered university.
HIPAA “does not apply to user-generated data from the
platforms,” including reality checks, self-assessments and
quizzes, according to Andrews.
If another app picks up intimate information from the mental
health or well-being app, details entered by the student aren’t
covered and can be sent elsewhere. And, Andrews said, because
HIPAA protections apply only to medical information, data such
as location, sleep cycles and number of steps taken daily,
though they may reflect a change in health or could be used to
predict health status, is not legally considered “health
information.”
When data from a mental health app is shared or sold to other
parties, a wealth of information can be used for purposes
beyond the health needs of students. Insurers can use it to
calculate premiums, employers can use it to assess risk,
advertisers can use it to tailor ads to consumer preferences or
conditions, and all can exploit students’ weaknesses.
A student suffering from an eating disorder may be presented an
ad for laxatives, or, if a student is flagged as a suicide risk or
likely to suffer from severe depression, he or she may be denied
a job or security clearance.
“There can be significant real-life consequences,” Andrews
said. “The health advantages just don’t outweigh the privacy
risks.”

6. Work Cited
Paul, Deanna. “Colleges Want Freshmen to Use Mental Health
Apps. But Are They Risking Students’ Privacy.” Washington
Post. 2 Jan. 2020.
Top of Form
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Prof. Della Fera
EN 101/102
Research Paper Notetaking & Sourcing
There are three main ways to take notes when reading
information for your research paper. They are summarizing,
paraphrasing, and direct quoting.
1. Summarizing: When you summarize information that you
read, you extract the main point from the sentences and you
condense the ideas into a shortened synopsis. A summary is
only one or two sentences in total. If the idea is not your own,
you must still source the information. That is, you will write
the author’s last name or the title of the article [if there is no

7. author]) in parenthesis after the summary that you have written.
Practice: Watch a YouTube video on the subject that you are
pursuing and write a summary of the video clip. Be sure to
write down everything you need to know about the video in
order to create a bibliography/works cited page. (See the second
half of this handout for that information).
Cite the author or poster’s name after in parenthesis.
2. Paraphrasing: Paraphrasing is similar to summarizing
information in that you take the words of somebody else and
you write those ideas in your own words. The difference is that
paraphrasing is longer than a summary because you are using
more of the ideas from what you have read. Like a summary,
you must cite the source after you paraphrase even if you put
the ideas in your own words. Why? Because you are taking the
ideas of another and you don’t want to be accused of
plagiarizing!
Practice: Go to an article that you have found on your topic and
read a few paragraphs, and then condense those ideas into a
short paragraph in your own words. Cite the author after in
parenthesis.
3. Direct Quoting: Taking the words of someone else and
writing them exactly as you see them is direct quoting and
needs to be shown as such with quotation marks around
everything that you took from another writer. Like
summarizing and paraphrasing, you need to end the quote with
an in-text citation which shows the author’s name in
parenthesis.

8. Ex. One psychologist explains, “The Oedipal Complex seems to
be stronger in females than in males” (Johnson).
Practice: Read a different article on your topic and extract a
quote that seems to work well at supporting your topic idea.
Write the quote as I have shown above.
4. Sourcing Information Needed: Refer to the Purdue
University Online Writing Lab (OWL)
How to cite a YouTube clip for your work cited page:
Author’s Name or Poster’s Username. “Title of Image or
video.” Media Type. Name of Website.
Name of Website’s Publisher, date of posting. Medium. Date
retrieved.
A) Example of a specific YouTube clip:
Shimabukuro, Jake. “Ukulele Weeps by Jake Shimabukuro.”
Online video clip. YouTube.
YouTube, 22 Apr. 2006. Web. 9 Sept. 2010.
How to cite an online article for your work cited page:
Author or editor’s name, article name in quotation marks, title
of the website, publisher’s name if given, date of publication (if
given), medium of publication (web), date you accessed the
material, URL optional
B) Example of what it looks like when you put it in correct
format:
Wilson, Joe. “The Art of Friendship.” Psychology Weekly.
American Institute of Psychology, 2009. Web.
10 March 2016.

9. EN 101
Prof. Della Fera
RESEARCH PAPER
What it is: The research paper is a typed written work which
sets out to argue an opinion you have on a certain topic. Like a
lawyer trying to win his/her case in court, you must build a
strong argument with much evidence. If your proof is weak,
that is, you don’t find many sources that agree with you and
back you up, then your ultimate argument will be a weak one.
Therefore, you are trying to argue an educated opinion on a
topic, and strengthen it with words from reliable experts who
and sources that provide additional facts, information, theories
and opinions that agree with your point of view.
Topic: In our case, your topic has already been established.
To specify, you are asserting whether technological advances
are worth the privacy loss to people or not.
You will be supporting and bolstering your
ideas/comments/opinions from credible outside sources, and we
will spend time researching this topic from our databases,
Youtube, and other resource avenues found in the library and on
the Internet.
You cannot write this paper using any 1st person pronouns (I,
we, us, my, mine, our) and/or 2nd person pronouns (you, your).
Additionally, you need to avoid any personal stories and
examples, though you may use examples of those you read from
articles and other outside sources. Since a research paper is the
most formal writing you will ever do, the tone must be academic
and not in the least bit conversational (hence the removal of 1st
and 2nd person pronouns).
Since a research paper can be a daunting assignment, one way to
approach it is to think of this paper first as a five paragraph

10. essay that you are used to doing. After you have written a draft
which establishes your opinions and ideas, you will then add
outside support.
· You will add outside information to already existing
paragraphs if the information is relevant to the paragraph’s
main point.
· Or you will add NEW and ADDITIONAL paragraphs to new
information you have found. That is, whenever you find new
points to build your case, you will add them to your essay #1.
· This research paper will ultimately build upon your essay #1
assignment since you have already laid the groundwork for this
topic with that first essay.
You will be working hard outside of class on this paper during
the next few weeks including the upcoming spring break. This
is in addition to the remaining work (other essays) that must be
written. From now on, you will always be working on several
projects at the same time!
Purpose: The ultimate academic purpose of the research paper
is two-fold:
1. The research paper teaches a student how to be an informed
individual with concrete and founded opinions.
2. This kind of project teaches how to sift through countless
information and decipher what is reliable and what is not. You
must learn to rely on both, common sense and some detective
work. Sometimes you need to go out and verify a fact that you
are not sure is true. Ultimately, as educated citizens in society,
we need to learn that we cannot believe everything we read or
hear.
Criteria:
1. The paper must be between 4-6 typed pages not counting the
last works cited page. It will be in Times New Roman 12 point

11. font and everything is double spaced.
2. It is due on Tuesday, April 21 for Tues/Thursday classes and
Friday, April 24 for my Friday class.
3. YOU MAY NOT EMAIL YOUR RESEARCH PAPER TO
ME. If you don’t have your paper in on the assigned due date,
then you will have to hand it in the following class. Please take
into account that “Murphy’s Law” always prevails; what can go
wrong, will go wrong. To avoid technical, academic, or
personal difficulties, make sure your paper is finished a couple
of days before the due date. You will breathe a lot easier!
4. You must pass this paper with a “C” or better.
5. You must have at least 5 sources for this research paper. You
can use the article by Deanna Paul as one of the sources. You
may also use articles from our library’s databases or Google,
(also try Google Scholar) and possibly YouTube if you find
reliable sources.