Marketing AnalyticsData Privacy
FTC Sues Hims & Hers Over Sensitive Health Data Sharing
The FTC has sued Hims & Hers, alleging it shared sensitive health data with Meta and Snap without consent and made subscription cancellation deliberately hard.
Key takeaways
- The FTC is suing Hims & Hers for allegedly sharing sensitive health data with third-party ad platforms, including Meta and Snap, without consent.
- The suit also alleges the company made it 'extremely difficult' for consumers to cancel subscriptions.
- Hims & Hers responded that its privacy policy 'makes clear' how patient data is used, including for ad targeting based on pages viewed.
- This follows FTC actions against GoodRx and BetterHelp in 2023 over similar health-data-to-ad-platform sharing.
- Marketers running health, wellness or supplement verticals should audit pixel and CAPI integrations against consent language this week.
What happened
The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Hims & Hers, alleging the telehealth company shared sensitive health data with third-party ad platforms, including Meta and Snap, without consumer consent, according to AdExchanger's Daily News Roundup. The complaint also alleges the company made it "extremely difficult" for customers to cancel subscriptions.
Hims & Hers pushed back quickly, posting a letter on its site claiming its privacy policy "makes clear" how patient information gets used. That claim is technically accurate: the policy states that viewing a webpage about balding or erectile dysfunction treatments may trigger the company to hand that browsing activity to an advertising partner, which then targets the consumer with related ads on other sites.
Why marketers should care
If your funnel touches GLP-1s, mental health, fertility, or any category where a page view reveals a medical condition, the pixel-to-ad-platform pipeline that once felt routine is now the FTC's target. A privacy policy that discloses data sharing in dense legal language isn't the shield it used to be; regulators are testing whether disclosure equals meaningful consent, and this suit suggests the agency thinks it doesn't.
The subscription-cancellation allegation matters too. Dark patterns around cancellation flows are increasingly bundled with data-sharing complaints, meaning your retention team's friction tactics are now part of the same regulatory exposure as your ad tech stack.
This week's move: pull your Meta and Snap CAPI event mappings for any health, wellness or supplement vertical and confirm no condition-specific URL data or page titles are leaking into event parameters. If you're auditing broader vendor exposure, our martech stack audit guide walks through the same review for consent gaps elsewhere in the stack.
Attribution teams relying on health-adjacent signals should also revisit which models still touch sensitive categories at all; see our comparison of 2026 attribution models for approaches that don't require condition-level targeting to work.
Audit your health and wellness data flows before regulators do it for you.
Advertiser disclosure: some links in our articles are affiliate links, and CMO Mag may earn a commission or referral fee if you sign up or buy through them, at no cost to you. It never affects our editorial coverage. See our advertising & affiliate policy.
More in Marketing Analytics
View all
Court Dismisses Google's DMCA Claims Against SerpApi
Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's anti-circumvention claims against SerpApi, ruling that blocking scrapers from results with no copyrighted content doesn't violate the DMCA.
Marketing Attribution Models Compared for 2026 Budgets
Five attribution models, five different campaign winners. Here's how each one actually works, where it breaks in a cookieless and AI-crawled web, and how to pick one before you lock FY2026 budgets.
Google Says AI Search Sends 'Billions' of Clicks Weekly, No Data Shown
Google's Nick Fox posted new click figures for AI features in Search, but without a denominator or methodology, marketers still have no way to verify what the numbers mean for their own sites.
Discussion
No comments yet. Be the first to say something worth reading.