FTC

Person standing up looking at their phone with a city in the background
By  Jessica Hagen 11:56 am May 19, 2023
Fertility-tracking app Premom, owned by Easy Healthcare, came under fire by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged the company shared consumers' health data with third parties like Google, AppsFlyer and two China-based analytics and marketing firms for advertising purposes without user consent. Premom is a free app that offers fertility tracking tools, including period and ovulation tracking...
Moderator David Gray and Jodi Daniel
By  Emily Olsen 02:52 pm April 19, 2023
After years of slow movement advancing telehealth, remote patient monitoring and other digital health technologies, the landscape changed rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Jodi Daniel, managing director of Crowell Health Solutions.  At HIMSS23, Daniel, who previously served as the founding director of the Office of Policy in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information...
A sign outside Amazon headquarters.
By  Emily Olsen 11:29 am September 6, 2022
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon's $3.9 billion acquisition of primary care provider One Medical. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, One Medical parent 1Life Healthcare and Amazon both received requests from the FTC for more information regarding the deal on Sept. 2. The planned acquisition was first announced in late July. In the filing, 1Life...
Person with wearable
By  Laura Lovett 11:39 am September 16, 2021
With data breaches on the rise, the FTC is looking to make health apps more accountable for telling patients when their data has been exposed. The FTC released a new statement specifying that all health apps that capture sensitive patient information notify users, the commission itself and in some cases the media when a security breach has compromised identifiable health data. If the company...
By  Dave Muoio 03:11 pm January 13, 2021
Period and fertility-tracking-app maker Flo Health has settled with the Federal Trade Commission regarding a complaint alleging improper disclosure of sensitive user data to third-party marketing and analytics services from Facebook, Google and others, the agency announced today. The FTC's complaint listed several ways in which Flo deceived its users. These included messaging from the company...
By  Jonah Comstock 03:26 pm September 22, 2017
When we broke the news in July of the shutdown of Pact, a startup that aimed to motivate users to go to the gym with monetary carrots and sticks, we noted that the reasons for the company's demise weren't readily apparent. Now a new missive from the FTC (first spotted by Gizmodo) is shedding some additional — and, truth be told, not very flattering — light on that story. While users were promised...
By  Jonah Comstock 02:23 pm January 24, 2017
Breathometer, the Mark Cuban-backed digital health startup that makes a smartphone-connected oral health sensor, has settled a suit with the Federal Trade Commission over its first product, a smartphone-connected breathalyzer. According to the terms of the settlement, Breathometer will have to offer a full refund to customers who bought the device. The FTC says that it discovered serious accuracy...
By  Jonah Comstock 10:51 am September 12, 2016
Teladoc's antitrust lawsuit against the Texas Medical Board (TMB) is still a long way from over, but an amicus curie brief filed this morning in the Fifth Circuit Court shows that the telemedicine company has friends in high places: namely, the US Federal Trade Commission. A quick refresher: Teladoc sued the TMB in state court way back in April 2015, alleging that because the board was made up of...
02:05 pm August 17, 2016
On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved a final order with EHR vendor Practice Fusion that will consent to a 20-year privacy practice order, stemming from its highly-publicized privacy scandal. The settlement was first announced in June, and after a 30-day comment period, the final order was unanimously approved, 3-0. Practice Fusion was charged with soliciting reviews from...
By  Jonah Comstock 03:57 pm July 19, 2016
The ONC issued a report to Congress today laying out the gaps that exist in health data protection. The report opines at length about non-covered entities (NCEs), the large swath of consumer-facing companies that aren’t subject to HIPAA. “The wearable fitness trackers, social media sites where individuals share health information through specific social networks, and other technologies that are...