The Federal Trade Commission is suing Hims & Hers, accusing the telehealth company of sharing customers’ sensitive health information with advertising platforms including Meta and Snap.
The complaint, filed on 29 July and joined by Utah and California, also alleges the company charged people without proper consent and made subscriptions deliberately hard to cancel.
The privacy claim is the most serious. The FTC says Hims & Hers passed customers’ health details to third-party advertisers, through uploaded customer lists and automatic tracking that fired off user actions to the platforms, echoing how hospital websites have leaked patient data despite promises to protect it.
The data at issue is not trivial. Hims & Hers sells treatments for conditions people rarely discuss in public, from hair loss to erectile dysfunction to mental health, which makes an alleged leak to ad platforms unusually sensitive.
Hims & Hers has grown into a telehealth giant on exactly these categories. It expanded into weight-loss drugs and built a subscription model that turned stigmatised prescriptions into a mass-market online business, which is why the data it holds is so revealing.
