The Federal Trade Commission has taken action against an alcohol addiction treatment service for allegedly disclosing users’ personal health data to third-party advertising platforms, including Met

According to the complaint, the company contradicted its privacy promises. From 2020-2022, the company allegedly disclosed users’ personal information, including their health information, to numerous third-party advertising platforms via tracking technologies, known as pixels and application programming interfaces (APIs), which Monument integrated into its website. Monument used the information to target ads for its services to both current users who subscribe to the lowest cost memberships and to target new consumers, according to the complaint.

Monument used these pixels and APIs to track “standard” and “custom events,” meaning instances in which consumers interacted with Monument’s website. The FTC says that Monument gave the custom events descriptive titles that revealed details about its users such as “Paid: Weekly Therapy” or “Paid: Med Management,” when a user signed up for a service. Monument disclosed this custom events information to advertising platforms along with users’ email addresses, IP addresses, and other identifiers, which enabled third parties to identify the users and associate the custom events with specific individuals, according to the complaint.

  • Null User Object
    37•1 month ago

    Wait. Am I reading this right? Their punishment for doing something that they weren’t supposed to be doing is just to stop doing it?

    • lemmyreaderOPEnglish
      23•1 month ago

      In addition to the ban on sharing data with third parties for advertising, the proposed order with Monument, which must be approved by a federal court before it can go into effect, also prohibits the company from misrepresenting its data collection and disclosure practices and imposes a $2.5 million civil penalty for violating OARFPA, which will be suspended due to the company’s inability to pay.

      They didn’t make enough money with this data selling to pay this fine ? Right.

      • Transporter Room 3
        25•1 month ago

        You get a fine you can’t pay? Sorry that’s illegal. Jail or seized assets. If you have no assets, just jail and garnished wages. Good luck paying your fine on 23 cents a week (minus taxes)

        This company gets a fine it can’t pay? “okay you don’t have to pay, just pinky swear you won’t do it again, now here’s a bailout go play with the other rich kids (and leave the poors to me cracks knuckles)”