WASHINGTON – Filling out a telehealth intake form requires a particular kind of trust. Patients describe symptoms they might not share with their own doctors: erectile dysfunction, unwanted hair loss, difficulty managing weight, depression. In exchange for that disclosure, they expect care and discretion. The Federal Trade Commission says Hims & Hers Health gave them neither, and on Tuesday it sued the company in federal court for transmitting users’ most sensitive health disclosures to Meta and Snap without any meaningful disclosure to the patients whose information it was sending.
The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and joined by Utah and California’s Los Angeles County Counsel, names two interrelated violations: a privacy scheme that routed patient health data through digital advertising pipelines, and a billing structure that charged customers for prescriptions before they had a chance to review or refuse their treatment. The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction, monetary damages, and civil penalties, according to the agency’s press release.
The privacy allegations center on tools common to digital marketing but rarely examined in the context of patient data. The FTC says Hims & Hers embedded third-party tracking technologies on its website that automatically transmitted user “events” to Meta and Snap: form completions, page visits, intake submissions. Beyond those passive data flows, the company uploaded patient lists to those advertising platforms directly, the agency says, allowing it to match medical-intake customers to their social-media profiles. The data that moved through those systems was not incidental or de-identified. It carried the implicit signature of what a person was seeking treatment for.
The FTC’s complaint does not specify, in its publicly available sections, which exact medical conditions appeared in those data transfers, or how granular the information became once it reached Meta’s and Snap’s advertising systems. That level of detail is likely in the sealed exhibit material and will become clearer if the case reaches discovery. It is also the central factual question Hims & Hers will contest: the company says the FTC has mischaracterized how its technology works, and the court will have to resolve that dispute before any finding of liability is possible. According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California, the FTC’s core theory is that the company’s privacy representations were materially misleading to consumers who had no reason to believe their intake responses were being shared with advertisers.
Christopher Mufarrige, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the agency’s complaint “lays out a troubling scenario: consumers unknowingly locked into recurring subscriptions and the disclosure to third parties of consumers’ most private health information.” The action was brought by the FTC’s Western Region Los Angeles office, staffed by Siobhan Amin, Barbara Chun, and Jordan Navarrette.
The billing allegations describe a checkout flow built, the FTC contends, to obscure when charges would occur. Hims & Hers displayed “Pay $0 today” on its intake forms and marketed consultations as free, then charged patients the moment a provider wrote a prescription, the agency says, without giving them any opportunity to review or decline the recommended course of care. Recurring subscriptions were processed roughly 10 days earlier than a reasonable reading of the subscription terms would suggest, and cancellation required action two days before that accelerated billing date, a structure the FTC says was designed to keep subscribers inside unwanted refills.
Hims & Hers rejected the complaint with notable sharpness. The lawsuit “disregards substantial evidence we provided the FTC during its nearly three-year investigation, ignores established state laws and industry standards in telehealth, and contorts the law to try to manufacture claims,” the company’s communications team said Tuesday. The company called the action “not enforcement grounded in consumer protection” but “an effort to generate headlines at our expense,” and said it would vigorously defend itself. Investors moved before any court did: shares fell roughly 15 percent Tuesday, the sharpest single-session drop the stock had seen since May.
The action fits within a broader pattern of the FTC pushing the edge of its consumer-protection authority across digital industries simultaneously. Earlier this month, the commission argued that a Colorado AI regulation might exceed state preemption limits, a position that illustrated how far it was extending its statutory reading of federal consumer-protection law. And the Hims & Hers suit follows just days after the FTC moved against Shein over its own disclosure practices in a Hong Kong IPO filing. The breadth of the commission’s recent docket reflects an agency operating at the edge of what existing law allows across several industries at once.
For Meta, inclusion in the complaint extends a regulatory logic that has been building for years. Meta’s handling of off-site user data has drawn scrutiny from European regulators and, more recently, American enforcement actions. Its appearance in the Hims & Hers complaint does not introduce a new theory; it introduces a new category of company whose data flows into Meta’s advertising system are now being examined under federal consumer-protection law. Snap’s inclusion is less established as a precedent and suggests the FTC mapped the full range of Hims & Hers’ advertising relationships rather than focusing only on its largest platform partner.
The FTC filed its case in court rather than through a settlement agreement, which means a judge will resolve it if neither side reaches a deal. Hims & Hers insists the three-year investigation produced evidence that undercuts the claims; what that evidence is remains sealed. The company’s “vigorously defend” language signals a longer legal fight rather than an early negotiated resolution, though the economics of litigation and the prospect of a binding injunction often lead companies to settlements that wire reports rarely capture in advance.
What neither party can answer yet is what a final order would require Hims & Hers to change about how it structures the relationship between a patient’s intake form and an advertiser’s targeting system. That is the practical regulatory question the lawsuit actually raises. It has no answer.
