FTC sues Hims & Hers over health data sent to Meta and Snap

What exactly is alleged?

Two things, and the pairing is the point. First, that Hims & Hers routed sensitive health information — the kind generated when someone seeks treatment for hair loss, erectile dysfunction, mental health or weight management — to third-party advertising platforms, while publicly promising the service was private and discreet. Second, that its billing and cancellation flows charged people in ways they hadn't clearly agreed to.

Those are the same two failure modes that dominate our own scoring. Advertising trackers on health data cost points on our Data rights axis; a cancellation flow harder than signup is the "roach motel" entry in our dark-pattern taxonomy. Seeing both in one complaint is not a coincidence — companies that treat consent as a formality tend to treat it as a formality everywhere.

Why does this matter beyond one company?

Because the mechanism is ubiquitous. Advertising pixels and SDKs are the default way consumer apps measure marketing, and dropping one into a health flow takes a single line of code and no clinical review. The category has been running on the assumption that regulators would treat wellness data as ordinary consumer data. This complaint tests that assumption directly, with a state attorney general and a county counsel attached.

It also lands three weeks before the FTC signalled a broader interest in consent for tracking technologies, which suggests this isn't a one-off.

What should you do about it?

If you use any telehealth or health app for something you'd consider private, assume the marketing page's privacy language is a claim rather than a control. Check the settings for an advertising or analytics opt-out and use it. Where an app offers a genuine data export and deletion path, that's a better signal of intent than any privacy badge.