Online mental health company BetterHelp, Inc. is facing allegations on two fronts for allegedly sharing personal identifiable information with third parties and breaching consumer privacy.

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) initiated an administrative complaint against the California-based online mental health company on March 2, 2023, after what they call years of deceptive practices and blatant denial of a media report published by Jezebel in February 2020. The article cited evidence that BetterHelp shares sensitive patient information and email account information with third parties such as Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest.

Days after the FTC filed its complaint, consumers filed two class actions in the Northern District of California’s San Jose Division (C.M. v. BetterHelp, Inc., March 7, 2023, 5:23-cv-01033 and Jane Doe v. BetterHelp, Inc., March 11, 2023, 5:23-cv-01096). Both consumer privacy lawsuits state that their facts are largely supported by experts in the field of data privacy.

BetterHelp is a Delaware corporation with its principal office or place of business in Mountain View, Calif. On its website the company claims it is the “world’s largest therapy platform” with more than 25,000 licensed therapists available. BetterHelp operates generalized mental health therapy services and operates specialized therapy services for members of the LGBTQ community, members of the Christian Faith, Spanish-speaking clients, and teen counseling with parental consent. BetterHelp founder Alon Matas stated in a Medium article published Oct. 8, 2018, that, “One of our core missions is to destigmatize mental health. We firmly believe that nobody should ever feel ashamed or embarrassed to reach out for help.”

Explosive Growth

The FTC complaint states that BetterHelp’s website and app “has seen explosive growth over the last few years,” adding more than 118,000 U.S. users in 2018, 158,000 in 2019, and 641,000 in 2020. BetterHelp required new users between August 2017 to December 2020 to fill out mandatory questionnaires. These intake questionnaires reportedly ask a user’s age, marital status, whether they’ve been in therapy before, how they rate their sleeping and eating habits, employment status, and whether they are experiencing overwhelming emotions such as sadness, grief, and depression, and whether they have suicidal ideation.

BetterHelp repeatedly assured users filling out these questionnaires that their email addresses and information would be “kept strictly private” and “never shared, sold or disclosed to anyone.” However, FTC said its investigation revealed that the company used clandestine tactics to share health information of more than 7 million users with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest.

The FTC has filed a proposed order that would require BetterHelp to pay $7.8 million as compensation to users who signed up for BetterHelp’s services between Aug. 1, 2017 and Dec. 31, 2020. The compensation is intended to recoup costs patients paid to BetterHelp. The average patient paid an average $60 – $90 per week for these counseling services. The proposed order would also prohibit BetterHelp from sharing consumers’ health data for advertising, sharing their personal information for re-targeting, or serving ads to consumers who had visited the company’s website or app. The FTC is pushing for BetterHelp to accept a settlement where the company agrees to limit their data sharing in the future and the company would be directed to contact affected consumers about the case and must also direct third parties such as Facebook or Pinterest to delete consumers’ health and other personal data shared with them.

Consumer Privacy Investigative Report

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jezebel gathered information on how BetterHelp handles its users’ data by having Jezebel employees sign up for therapeutic services and monitoring the kinds of information BetterHelp was collecting and sending to third parties. When presented with the findings, BetterHelp said their methods were “standard and that they far exceed all applicable, regulatory, ethical and legal requirements.” Jezebel reported that BetterHelp slipped data to dozens of third parties, monitored their behavior online, and signaled to companies like Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Pinterest that the applicants were considering BetterHelp services.

The FTC’s investigation followed the investigative report. The Commission states that in December 2020 BetterHelp changed its privacy statement to say, “Rest assured – your health information will stay private between you and your counselor” which was in use until September 2021. Upon notice of the FTC’s investigation and public pressure from consumers, the company changed its privacy statement again in October 2021 to say that it does disclose visitors’ IP addresses and other personal identifiers for advertising, and offered visitors an opportunity to out of these disclosures. Users did not have the option to opt out prior to October 2021.

The FTC describes two methods that BetterHelp used to send information to Facebook.

• In the first, the company compiled visitors’ and users’ email addresses which they then uploaded to Facebook to match the individuals with their Facebook user accounts for the purposes of targeting them and others like them with advertisements.
• Secondly, between 2013 and December 2020, Better Help shared visitors’ and users’ email address, their IP address, and records known as “events” to Facebook. These events automatically tracked when each visitor or user on the main website or affiliate websites answered certain questions on the intake questionnaire or when they enrolled in a certain service. BetterHelp automatically disclosed these events to Facebook through what are known as web beacons that were placed on every website they operated.

With two consumer privacy class actions looming and the FTC’s administrative complaint, BetterHelp faces significant pressure to make serious changes.