You’ve built a practice on trust. Clients share their deepest fears, traumas, and struggles because they trust you’ll protect that vulnerability.
Does your website honor that same trust?
The Unique Privacy Needs of Mental Health Practices
Mental health professionals face heightened privacy concerns:
- The mere fact someone sought mental health services can be stigmatizing
- Topics clients research (depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction) are deeply personal
- Confidentiality is foundational to therapeutic relationships
- Breaches can cause significant harm
Standard website analytics weren’t designed with these concerns in mind.
What Google Analytics Reveals About Your Prospective Clients
When someone visits your therapy practice’s website, Google Analytics captures:
The pages they viewed:
- /services/trauma-therapy
- /services/couples-counseling
- /conditions/anxiety-disorders
- /blog/coping-with-depression
How they got there:
- Search terms that led to your site
- Referral from another mental health resource
- Link from a support group forum
Who they are:
- IP address (can identify them)
- Device information
- Geographic location
- Time spent on each page
This data paints an intimate picture: Someone in [city], using [device], researched trauma therapy for [duration], after searching for [terms].
That’s exactly the kind of information mental health ethics require protecting.
Professional Ethics and Website Privacy
APA Ethics Code (Psychologists)
The American Psychological Association’s ethics code includes:
“Psychologists have a primary obligation… to take reasonable precautions to protect confidential information.”
Does allowing Google to track prospective clients meet the “reasonable precautions” standard when alternatives exist?
NASW Code of Ethics (Social Workers)
The National Association of Social Workers requires:
“Social workers should protect the confidentiality of all information obtained in the course of professional service.”
Prospective client inquiries are part of professional service. Website visits are often the first inquiry.
ACA Code of Ethics (Counselors)
The American Counseling Association states:
“Counselors recognize that trust is a cornerstone of the counseling relationship.”
Trust begins before the first session. It begins when someone visits your website to learn about your services.
The HIPAA Dimension
If you’re a covered entity under HIPAA (and most mental health practices are), the analysis gets more serious.
PHI includes information that:
- Relates to physical or mental health
- Can identify an individual
Website visits to a mental health practice clearly relate to mental health. IP addresses can identify individuals. Together, they may constitute PHI.
Google is not your Business Associate. You don’t have a BAA with them. Sending them PHI is a potential violation.
Note: This isn’t legal advice—consult your compliance officer or attorney.
The Therapeutic Relationship Consideration
Beyond legal requirements, consider the therapeutic implications:
What if clients knew?
Imagine explaining to a client: “By the way, when you researched our practice online, we sent your browsing behavior to Google, the world’s largest advertising company.”
How would that conversation go? Would it affect the therapeutic relationship?
The informed consent problem
Meaningful consent requires understanding. Most clients don’t understand:
- What cookies do
- How tracking works
- Where their data goes
- How it might be used
A cookie banner doesn’t create informed consent—it creates the illusion of consent.
Setting the tone
Your website is often a client’s first interaction with your practice. Using aggressive tracking sends an implicit message about your privacy values.
Starting the relationship with surveillance seems antithetical to the safety and trust therapy requires.
What Therapists Actually Need from Analytics
Let’s be practical. You need to know:
- Is your website attracting potential clients?
- Which services are people interested in?
- Is your marketing working?
- Should you write more about certain topics?
You don’t need:
- Individual visitor tracking
- Advertising profiles
- Cross-site behavior data
- Personally identifiable information
Simple, aggregate analytics answer your business questions without compromising privacy.
Our Approach for Mental Health Practices
Zero Trust Analytics was built with privacy as the foundation:
What we DON’T collect:
- IP addresses (only anonymous hashes)
- Cookies or persistent identifiers
- Individual browsing paths
- Any information that could identify specific visitors
What we DO provide:
- Total visitor counts
- Popular pages (so you know what content resonates)
- Traffic sources (so you know what marketing works)
- Device breakdowns (so you know if mobile matters)
- Geographic regions (country/state level only)
You get the insights to grow your practice without creating records about who researched mental health services.
Making Your Practice Website Privacy-First
Step 1: Audit current tracking
Open your website in Chrome, press F12, go to Network tab, reload. What requests go to third parties? What cookies are set?
Step 2: Remove invasive tracking
Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and similar tools should go. If you use them for advertising, consider privacy-friendly alternatives.
Step 3: Add privacy-first analytics
Our script is one line of code. No cookies. No consent banner needed. No confidentiality concerns.
Step 4: Update your privacy policy
Your website privacy policy should accurately reflect your practices. With privacy-first analytics, you can honestly say you don’t track individual visitors.
Step 5: Consider it part of your ethical practice
Just as you take confidentiality seriously in sessions, extend that commitment to your digital presence.
A Note on Marketing
Some therapists worry that privacy-first analytics means giving up effective marketing. Not true.
You can still:
- Track which pages get traffic
- Measure campaign effectiveness (with UTM parameters)
- Understand audience interests
- See traffic trends
You just do it without creating individual records that could identify who sought mental health services.
That’s actually better marketing—you’re not losing 30%+ of traffic to ad blockers that block Google Analytics.
Your clients trust you with their mental health. Honor that trust online. Start your free trial with privacy-first analytics for therapists.