Healthline

⚠️ Article status notice: This Article's Relevance Is Under Review

This article has been flagged for questionable relevance. Its connection to the systemic consumer protection issues outlined in the Mission statement and Moderator Guidelines isn't clear.

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Notice: This Article's Relevance Is Under Review

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To justify the relevance of this article:

• Provide evidence demonstrating how the issue reflects broader consumer exploitation (e.g., systemic patterns, recurring incidents, or related company policies).
• Link the problem to modern forms of consumer protection concerns, such as privacy violations, barriers to repair, or ownership rights.

If you believe this notice has been placed in error, or once you have made the required improvements, please visit either the Moderator's noticeboard, or the #appeals channel on our Discord server: Join Here. There may be a discussion about this article on its talk page.

Healthline

Basic information
Founded	1999
Legal Structure	Subsidiary
Industry	Health Information
Also known as
Official website	https://www.healthline.com

Healthline Media, Inc. is an American website and provider of health information. It was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com. In July 2019, the company was acquired by Red Ventures.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Incidents

Add one-paragraph summaries of incidents below in sub-sections, which link to each incident's main article while linking to the main article and including a short summary. It is acceptable to create an incident summary before the main page for an incident has been created. To link to the page use the "Hatnote" or "Main" templates.

If the company has numerous incidents then format them in a table (see Amazon for an example).

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Healthline category.

Violating California's CCPA (2025.07.01)

On 01 July 2025, the California Attorney General announced in a press release that they have reached a settlement with Healthline over the company's violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). In an investigation conducted by the California DOJ, Healthline violated the CCPA by failing to provide consumers with the option to opt-out of targeted advertising and sharing user data to third parties without implementing "CCPA-mandated privacy protections". This shared data also included suggesting that a person may suffer from a serious health condition. The settlement resulted in $1.55 million in civil pentalties and banning the company from revealing that a consumer may have already been diagnosed with a medical condition.

Usage of AI generation

In their "ABOUT US" page they mention:

In some cases, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or similar technology, may be used in developing elements of our content.

Medical information is a highly delicate matter and AI which is known to quite frequently "hallucinate" can generate bogus information which may mislead a potentially vulverable person to make a life threatening decision.

Rejecting cookies restricts site access

Like many websites, Healthline asks for cookies upon accessing the site. Upon clicking on "Reject All", the user is taken to a "Anon" page which includes only 10 articles. On the same page they expain their reasoning:

We believe that health information should be free to everyone and we rely on advertising to make this possible on our family of websites Healthline, Medical News Today, Greatist, and Psych Central. Providing the best health information in the world is expensive. We spend up to thousands of dollars per article to ensure it is accurate and precise with quality review by a doctor or other certified, trained medical professional.

Products

This is a list of the company's product lines with articles on this wiki.

• Example product line one (release date): Short summary of the product's incidents.
• Example product line two (release date):

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See also

Link to relevant theme articles or companies with similar incidents.

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