Gameday Men’s Health Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Use of Third-Party Tracking Pixels on Website

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Gameday Men’s Health has been hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that the men’s healthcare provider clandestinely uses tracking pixels to track, compile and distribute patient information obtained while users book appointments on its website.

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The 41-page Gameday class action lawsuit accuses the company of violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which protects consumers from having their personal communications disclosed to third parties without their express consent. According to the lawsuit, Gameday secretly installed three third-party trackers on its site that transmitted patients’ information to Google, Zeta and TikTok without their knowledge or permission.

According to the lawsuit, Gameday is a men’s health provider that is “committed to redefining men’s wellness” and offers a variety of services, including testosterone therapy, plasma therapy for hair loss, and treatments for impotence. Importantly, the suit points out that the “intimate” health struggles that Gameday treats are highly confidential and that “[c]onfidentiality is paramount to the health industry.”

The filing further emphasizes the importance of privacy when it comes to men’s health, stating that “patients reasonably expect sensitive and legally protected information related to their appointment will remain confidential and protected from third parties,” especially when treatment pertains to sexual and reproductive health.

However, “in the pursuit of profit and to the detriment of patient privacy,” Gameday allegedly made agreements with Google, Zeta and TikTok to use their trackers on GamedayMensHealth.com to “intercept” patients’ communications when they make appointments and use the website.

The suit alleges that information collected by these trackers, particularly those that transmit patient data to Google Analytics, can be used to generate reports on web traffic, engagement and demographics for patients using the Gameday site.  Per the suit, the trackers are configured to collect both the “characteristics” of users’ communications (such as IP addresses, device identifiers, emails and phone numbers) and the content of those communications (such as the buttons they click and the pages they view), which could reveal information about the medical treatment being received by individual users.

Furthermore, the suit says tracking pixels allow Google to create a “browser fingerprint” used to identify individual website users even when a device’s IP address is obscured or cookies are blocked, thereby transmitting a “wide variety of data” to Google. According to the lawsuit, users cannot simply clear their fingerprint like they could with cookies and therefore have no control over how their personal information is collected.

The lawsuit further argues that even if some of the data transmitted was “hashed,” or given a numerical value without words, Federal Trade Commission guidelines state that because the same input data always results in the same hash, “hashes aren’t ‘anonymous’ and can still be used to identify users.”

Once information is transmitted from the third-party tracking pixels, the case says, it is analyzed to optimize third-party marketing campaigns and targeted advertising.

Essentially, the case says, Google, Zeta, and TikTok all derive a financial benefit from using unlawfully transmitted, highly sensitive personal health information to develop consumer profiles and targeted advertising campaigns.

The Gameday class action lawsuit seeks to cover all individuals residing in the United States who, during the applicable statute of limitations period, booked an appointment on the Gameday Men’s Health website.

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