Recent FTC Post Commits To Protecting Sensitive Health Data After White House Issues Related Executive Order

On July 8, 2022, following the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, the president signed an executive order that called on a number of federal agencies to take steps to protect reproductive rights. He specifically asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to "consider taking steps to protect consumers' privacy when seeking information about and provision of reproductive health care services." The FTC responded swiftly with a high-profile post authored by the acting director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.

With one exception (discussed below), the FTC post mostly reiterates the agency's long-held commitment to addressing misuse of health and geolocation data. Health issues have been an FTC privacy focus for decades. Indeed, one of the FTC's first modern-era privacy cases was brought against a pharmaceutical company that inadvertently sent an email to consumers and put email addresses in the "To" line instead of the "Bcc" line," thereby