According to the complaint, Hims & Hers passed sensitive health condition data to ad platforms while promising its customers privacy. This is a charge, not a verdict. But the mechanism behind it sits in plenty of ordinary sites - maybe yours too.
- The US Federal Trade Commission, together with Utah and California, files suit against the telehealth platform Hims & Hers.
- The claim: sharing sensitive health information with third-party ad platforms despite promises of privacy.
- The suit also covers deceptive billing and cancellation practices.
The case is American and looks distant at first glance. But the mechanism is the same one already running on half the sites someone will launch next week - maybe yours.
The trap here is boring to the point of pain. Nobody sits down to sell health data on purpose. You put a tracking snippet on an ad platform to measure where customers come from. The snippet sits on every page. One of those pages is named after the condition you're treating. That's it. The page address has already made a diagnosis, and it's headed to someone else's server.
The other half of the suit is about billing and cancellation. It has nothing to do with technology, and that's exactly why it's instructive: the regulator looks at the whole customer journey, not just the ad code. Easy sign-up and hard cancellation is an old trick, and it's getting expensive more and more often.
This isn't a topic just for lawyers. It's for anyone who puts scripts on a site. When a site touches health, children or money, every piece of outside code on the page is a decision with consequences. Our pages carry no tracking - that's exactly why. Nothing can leak that you never collected.