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Online advisory platform BetterHelp has shared user data without explicit consent with companies like Facebook and Snapchat for advertising purposes, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has alleged.
The company, which trades under a range of other names, has agreed to pay out $7.8 million to consumers who signed up for its services between August 1, 2017 and December 31, 2020.
Subject to a 30-day public comment period, the FTC will make a final decision directing BetterHelp to perform a series of responsibilities that may require BetterHelp to stop sharing personally identifiable information with third parties.
BetterHelp data sharing
That reports an FTC document (opens in new tab), email addresses, IP addresses and health status and history – including current and past therapies – had been shared with third parties. It explains that BetterHelp “has repeatedly promised to keep [this data] private and use it for non-advertising purposes only,” which has since been found to be false over a seven-year period from 2013 to 2020.
It also found that employees were not adequately trained to handle sensitive data and that in a number of cases external companies had been given permission to use the data for their own research and product development.
In many cases, the data sharing took place over a long period of time. For example, between 2017 and 2018, BetterHelp had more than 7 million email addresses uploaded to Facebook. The platform later linked 4 million to existing Facebook user accounts.
IP address sharing had also been used to retarget previous users with more ads in an effort to generate revenue.
In response to the case BetterHelp (opens in new tab) explained:
“To clarify, we do not share private information such as member names or clinical data from therapy sessions with advertisers, publishers, social media platforms or other similar third parties. In addition, we do not and have never received any payment from any third party for any kind of information about any of our members.”