The news: Healthline Media settled with the California Attorney General’s office over allegations that Healthline.com failed to opt consumers out of having their personal information shared for targeted advertising.

Healthline will pay a $1.55 million fine—the largest settlement under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the first against a publisher. Healthline is also prohibited from sharing article titles with third parties revealing that a consumer may have already been diagnosed with a medical condition.

How we got here: Healthline.com allows online tracking technologies, which give advertisers and third parties unique data that could be used to identify consumers.

Per the settlement, Healthline allegedly violated the CCPA by:

• Not honoring consumers’ requests to opt out of having their personal information shared or sold.
• Sharing article titles suggesting a consumer may have already been diagnosed with a specific medical condition, such as “You’ve Been Newly Diagnosed with MS. What’s Next?”

Zooming out: California is among a growing cohort of states that have recently enacted privacy laws designed to safeguard consumer health data collected by companies that fall out of HIPAA’s scope. States are following the FTC’s precedent of cracking down on telehealth providers and other digital health companies for misusing consumer data.

Our take: Since state health data privacy laws are new, we will likely see increased scrutiny and more enforcement action against companies that previously went unchecked.

Healthline.com can’t afford to lose the credibility it has built up as a respected source of medical information. In fact, it’s one of the top 40 most visited websites in the world, according to the California AG. Healthline and other health content companies must verify that their opt-out tools work as intended while being transparent with advertisers about the consumer data they can and cannot share with them.

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