After authorities claimed that a business behind a well-known fertility app had exchanged users’ sensitive health information for years with Google and two Chinese corporations without their authorization, the company has agreed to pay $200,000 in federal and state fines.
The Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of Connecticut, the District of Columbia, and Oregon, the Premom app will also be prohibited from disclosing user health information for marketing purposes and will need to make sure that any information it shares without users’ consent is removed from third-party systems.
Fertility App Tracker Under Scrutiny
In light of the US Supreme Court’s ruling last year tearing down federal protections for abortion, regulators have increased their scrutiny of fertility trackers and health information, as demonstrated by Wednesday’s proposed settlement targeting Premom.
An FTC complaint against Easy Healthcare, Premom’s parent firm, alleges that the sharing of personal data harmed hundreds of thousands of Premom users from at least 2018 through 2020 and violates a law known as the Health Breach Notification Rule.
A request for comment from Premom was not immediately complied with.
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Premom Accused of Illegally Sharing Personal Health Data
After authorities claimed that a business behind a well-known fertility app had exchanged users’ sensitive health information for years with Google and two Chinese corporations without their authorization.
According to the complaint, Premom acquired and exchanged personally identifiable health information in contravention of its own privacy policy, which pledged to share only non-identifiable data, with Google and a third-party marketing company.
Additionally, the complaint claims that Jiguang and Umeng, two China-based data analytics firms, received location data and device identifiers from Premom, including WiFi network names and hardware IDs.
An FTC complaint was filed against Easy Healthcare, Premom’s parent firm, alleging that this information may be used to identify Premom users and reveal to others that these customers were using a reproductive app.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, a flurry of anti-abortion legislation has raised the possibility that fertility apps, search engines, and other technological platforms could be required to turn over user data in the event that abortion-seekers are prosecuted.
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