The allegation. The FTC, joined by the State of Utah and the County of Los Angeles, filed a complaint against Hims & Hers Health on July 29 in the Northern District of California. It alleges the telehealth company placed pixel-sized trackers from Meta, Snap, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, and X on its site, and that those trackers captured and shared user health information, contrary to its own privacy policy. The complaint also alleges customers were charged for prescriptions before speaking with a healthcare provider.
Hims & Hers disputes it. The company denied wrongdoing in a post on X, calling the lawsuit unsupported after a nearly three-year FTC investigation. Nothing here is settled; a complaint is an allegation, not a finding.
The part worth sitting with either way. Hims & Hers marketed its service as private and discreet. The FTC's complaint says the trackers ran anyway. A privacy claim on a marketing page and what actually loads on a page are two different things, and most people have no way to check the second one.
What to check before you upload health data anywhere. Whether the service is covered by HIPAA, or explicitly says it is not. Whether the actual privacy policy, not the marketing copy, names specific third parties it shares data with. Whether you can see or block third-party trackers on the page (a browser extension like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger will show you). And whether there is a real, working way to delete your data, not just deactivate an account.
None of this tells you whether any specific app is trustworthy. It tells you what questions to ask before you decide.