The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2023
BetterHelp promised mental health privacy — and shared data with Facebook for ads
BetterHelp promised privacy, then shared therapy session data with Facebook and Pinterest for ad targeting. FTC fine: $7.8M.
BetterHelp (Teladoc Health)
What happened
BetterHelp, the online therapy platform, built its business on a promise: your mental health data is private. The FTC found that promise was false. BetterHelp shared users' health status, medical histories, IP addresses, email addresses, and even the time and duration of therapy sessions with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising targeting.
In March 2023, the FTC filed a complaint alleging BetterHelp had broken its own privacy promises. The company had told users their information would be kept confidential while simultaneously handing their most sensitive data to ad platforms for retargeting. A Jezebel investigation in 2020 had already exposed that Facebook received therapy session times and approximate locations, linked to users' Facebook profiles.
The FTC finalised its order on July 14, 2023: a $7.8 million settlement for consumer refunds and a ban on sharing health data with third parties for advertising. BetterHelp said the settlement was 'not an admission of wrongdoing.' The company was the top podcast advertiser in America, spending nearly $8 million on podcast ads in December 2023 alone — the same year it was fined for the data practices that powered its growth.
Why it happened
- The privacy promise was the product: BetterHelp sold mental health services on confidentiality — sharing session times with Facebook while promising privacy was not a bug, it was the business model.
- The data was the ad targeting engine: health histories and therapy session data let BetterHelp retarget users across platforms — the growth was built on data the users were told was protected.
- The podcast spending revealed the scale: $8M per month on podcast ads confirmed the marketing machine was enormous — and powered by the same data-sharing the FTC banned.
- The 'not an admission' response was the tell: settling while denying wrongdoing let BetterHelp keep its narrative — but the ban on future data sharing removed the engine that drove the growth.
The lesson
A therapy platform that shares mental health data with Facebook for ad targeting has made its privacy promise the lie. The $8M monthly podcast budget ran on data users thought confidential.
Sources
- Wikipedia — BetterHelp (FTC investigation, data sharing, and settlement sections)
- FTC — FTC to Ban BetterHelp from Revealing Consumers' Data, Including Sensitive Mental Health Information, to Facebook
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