Online counseling platform BetterHelp shares user data with companies like Facebook and Snapchat for advertising purposes without explicit consent, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claims.
The company, which trades under a series of other names, agreed to pay out $7.8 million to consumers who signed up for its service between August 1, 2017 and December 31, 2020.
Subject to a 30-day public comment period, the FTC directs BetterHelp to undertake a series of responsibilities that may require BetterHelp to stop sharing personally identifiable information with third parties. make a final decision to
BetterHelp data sharing
According to the Fair Trade Commission document (opens in new tab) , email addresses, IP addresses, health status and history (including current and previous treatments) were shared with third parties. It explains that BetterHelp has “repeatedly promised to keep it.” [this data] For seven years from 2013 to 2020, this turned out to be wrong.
It also found that employees were not properly trained to handle sensitive data and, in many cases, were given permission to use the data by third-party companies for their own research and product development. Did.
Data sharing was done over many instances over a long period of time. For example, between 2017 and 2018 BetterHelp uploaded over 7 million of his email addresses to Facebook. The platform later matched 4 million of these to existing Facebook user accounts.
IP address sharing was also used to try to retarget previous users with more ads to generate revenue.
As a response to the incident, Better Help (opens in new tab) explanation:
“For clarity, we do not share personal information, such as member names or clinical data from treatment sessions, with advertisers, publishers, social media platforms, or other similar third parties. Furthermore, we have not been paid by, and have never received, any third party information of any kind about our members.”
