Diane, J.I., and myself often talk about where we want this business to be. Regularly we land on the same things: transparency, accountability, and the ability to reclaim your digital footprint from entities that aren’t using it in a respectful way. It upsets me to know that there are companies out there who hoover up our data and then sell or distribute it to others without our consent.
Today we’re going to talk about one of those culprits: BetterHelp.
I’m fairly open with those that I meet that see a therapist on a regular basis. This is increasingly becoming less taboo and for good reason. We regularly see professionals who help us with various organs, we have a different set of professionals who fix our houses and cars and then we also have professionals who help manage our finances. Why wouldn’t we see one about the most important organ we have, our brain? I love meeting with my therapist and it’s helped me run regular maintenance on my neurons for several years now.
Imagine my disgust when I got this email letting me know that a company I trusted (and paid) to use my data ONLY for health purposes decided to go rogue.
Now when this first came to my inbox I got a little cautious, this feels like it might be something a scammer would write to try and get my information. But there was a government website provided so I checked out ftc.gov/betterhelp. That page just had a bunch of logistics information about when I would be paid, but it was this page from the FTC that told me why I was getting paid.
In short…
- This payout relates to anyone who used BetterHelp’s (or few others) services between August 1, 2017 and December 31, 2020 (Hello Covid pandemic year 1).
- BetterHelp promised consumers it wouldn’t disclose their health information to 3rd parties.
- BetterHelp shared emails and answers to questions like “have you experienced depression?” with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest so that those companies could identify similar consumers and target them with BetterHelp advertisements.
- BetterHelp denied news reports that it was revealing personal information.
- BetterHelp didn’t place any restrictions on the information it shared so Facebook and others were allowed to use it for their own internal use like improving it’s advertising.
I share this with you today not to brag about $9.72 in my bank account (iced latte, here I come), but to remind you that accountability does happen for companies that aren’t being transparent or respecting their own stated privacy policies or terms and conditions. It will continue to happen as we get more aggressive on reclaiming our digital footprint. The payouts will get larger, because as time goes on there will be no excuse for companies to say they didn’t know better. As far as I’m concerned this partial refund should have been a full refund. But I’ll fight that fight another day.
Stay tuned with us, we’re going to be launching a system soon that will help you be aware of any class action suits you might be entitled to. It would be nice to not have these privacy violations… but it’s a close second to get paid out when they do occur.