SAN FRANCISCO — What Hims & Hers customers told the company about their bodies went further than those customers believed. The Federal Trade Commission made that argument in federal court in California on Wednesday, alleging the telehealth platform had routed sensitive health data — medical conditions, prescription inquiries, and sexual wellness information — through Meta’s and Snap’s advertising tracking systems without the informed consent of the people who submitted it.
Hims & Hers shares fell nearly 15 percent by the close, the market’s immediate verdict on the FTC’s complaint. The company’s stock had been trading at elevated levels on the strength of its subscription growth across erectile dysfunction, weight-loss, and dermatology products. The lawsuit introduces a legal risk that turns on how the company defined consent when it built its customer acquisition infrastructure around the same advertising platforms it was feeding with health data.
The FTC complaint, joined by California and Utah, was filed in the Northern District of California. FTC Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection Christopher Mufarrige described a situation where consumers handed over their most private medical information while believing it was protected: “The FTC’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 without their consent.” Hims & Hers said in a statement that “our customers have the information they need to make informed decisions about their care and the use of our services,” without addressing the specific data-sharing allegations.
The structure of the alleged privacy violation is specific to the telehealth subscription model. Hims & Hers offered virtual consultations for conditions many patients would prefer not to discuss with an insurance billing system or a traditional pharmacy — erectile dysfunction, hair loss, weight loss, anxiety. Patients provided health information to receive prescriptions. That information, the FTC alleges, also fed the Meta and Snap advertising systems the company used to find more customers with similar profiles. The tool that expanded the subscriber base was the same tool that disclosed what existing subscribers had shared in confidence.
The FTC complaint adds a subscription-cancellation claim alongside the data-sharing allegations. Customers who tried to end their Hims & Hers subscriptions encountered unclear disclosure of recurring charges and difficulty completing cancellations — a pattern the FTC has targeted at other subscription businesses in recent enforcement actions. The combination in a single complaint suggests regulators view the company’s consumer practices as systematically problematic rather than the result of isolated technical errors.
Hims & Hers was founded in 2017 and went public via SPAC merger. It operates in a sector that exists because the US healthcare system created strong demand for direct-to-consumer prescription services at lower cost and with less friction than a traditional physician visit. The company’s user base grew substantially during and after the pandemic as telehealth adoption normalized. That growth depended, in part, on digital advertising — which meant integrating Meta and Snap tracking technologies into the company’s web infrastructure, the precise mechanism the FTC now identifies as the source of the alleged privacy violation.
Meta’s own data practices have faced regulatory pressure from multiple directions in 2026, as the company expanded the personalization signals it collects from off-platform activity. The FTC’s complaint against Hims & Hers places the telehealth company in a causal relationship with Meta’s advertising infrastructure: it was not enough that Meta built the tracking tools; a healthcare company choosing to embed them in a patient-facing intake flow created the specific harm regulators are targeting. The distinction matters because it suggests the FTC is building a theory of liability that follows sensitive data into platforms that would not themselves face a HIPAA obligation.
The Snap component of the complaint receives less detail in public filings but adds a second advertiser platform to the data-flow allegations. Snap’s advertising audience is younger and the company has positioned itself as a privacy-focused alternative to Meta — a claim complicated by being named in a suit alleging it received patient health data it did not verify was properly consented.
Federal courts have shown increasing willingness to hold technology platforms accountable for data practices that harm consumers, a shift from the liability immunity framework that governed the early internet economy. The Hims & Hers lawsuit lands in a period where the intersection of health data and advertising is under active regulatory construction — the FTC has been building a body of health data enforcement actions, but most prior targets were fitness apps and period trackers rather than prescription-access platforms. Hims & Hers is the first telehealth company of its scale to face this level of federal enforcement attention over data-sharing practices.
What the lawsuit does not yet resolve: how Hims & Hers will defend its consent disclosures, what remedies the FTC and the state partners are seeking beyond the injunctive relief standard in FTC enforcement actions, and whether the health data was transmitted as explicit condition labels or inferred from behavioral signals. The company’s defense will likely turn on whether its privacy disclosures constituted adequate notice, a question the Northern District of California will ultimately decide. For the company’s 2026 guidance, the 15 percent single-day decline signals that investors are pricing meaningful legal uncertainty into a business whose growth depended on the data infrastructure now under scrutiny.
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