SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's Division of Consumer Protection has joined a lawsuit against telehealth company Hims & Hers Health, accusing it of improperly charging customers for subscriptions they never authorized and sharing private health information with advertisers without consent.
The Utah Attorney General's Office, representing the division, filed the lawsuit with the state of California and the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit was filed in California. It alleges Hims promoted a "free consult" that enrolled customers in recurring prescriptions based solely from an online form and no consultation with a healthcare provider. The lawsuit also claims that Hims forced people who wanted to cancel through a convoluted process and shared private information with Meta, Snap and other third-party advertisers.
"Hims promised a free consult and private healthcare. What Utahns actually got was a subscription trap and their most personal health data shipped to advertisers. We’re not letting Hims profit off broken promises. That's why we’re taking them to court," Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said in a statement.
The Division of Consumer Protection asks affected customers to file complaints at its website.
In a post on its website Wednesday, Hims & Hers Health insisted that it gives consumers control over privacy.
"We believe you deserve to understand how your information is collected and used. That’s why our Privacy Policy lays out our data practices and the safeguards we’ve built into our platform. Beyond those disclosures, our internal practices are designed to protect your information. For example, we separate and exclude information that patients share with their healthcare providers from marketing activity, configure technologies to prevent the transmission of protected health information, and use measures such as abstraction and hashing to reduce identifiable information, among other protective actions," the company said.
