Sell Data and Say You Didn’t: How Flo Health Got In Trouble with the FTC

The FTC sued Flo Health—a once-popular women’s health app used for tracking reproductive health information such as menstrual cycles and pregnancies—for lying to users about its privacy policies and claiming to keep health information private while actually selling the information to third parties. Flo Health misrepresented its compliance with international privacy laws that require notice, consent, and protection of personal information transferred to third parties and Flo agreed to settle these charges in 2021. Flo was required to obtain consent prior to sharing a consumer’s health information with a third party, undergo a compliance review conducted by a third party expert, notify users of the app that Flo shared information about their periods and pregnancies with third parties in violation of its privacy policies, and post a similar notice on its website.