FERTILITY-TRACKING APP FLO HEALTH SETTLES FTC OVER SENSITIVE DATA SHARING COMPLAINT

14.01.2021

Flo Health Inc., which is the developer of a period and fertility-tracking app used by more than 100 million consumers, has settled with U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) over the allegations that the company shared the health information of users with outside data analytics providers after promising that such information would be kept private.

In its complaint, the FTC alleges that Flo Health promised to keep users’ health data private and only use it to provide the app’s services to users. However in reality,  Flo Health disclosed health data from millions of users of its Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker app to third parties that provided marketing and analytics services to the app, including Facebook’s analytics division, Google’s analytics division, Google’s Fabric service, AppsFlyer, and Flurry.

As part of the proposed settlement, Flo Health is prohibited from misrepresenting the purposes for which it or entities to whom it discloses data collect, maintain, use, or disclose the data; how much consumers can control these data uses; its compliance with any privacy, security, or compliance program; and how it collects, maintains, uses, discloses, deletes, or protects users’ personal information. In addition, Flo must notify affected users about the disclosure of their personal information and instruct any third party that received users’ health information to destroy that data.

You can find the text of the FTC’s press release here.

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Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys-at-Law

info@zumbul.av.tr