LifeStance Reaches Settlement in Data Privacy Lawsuit Involving 1 Million Patients
By Ashleigh Hollowell | August 18, 2026
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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LifeStance Health (Nasdaq: LFST) has agreed to settle a 2023 class action lawsuit for a little over $3 million. Two former patients brought the case as class representatives on behalf of more than 1 million LifeStance patients affected by alleged data privacy violations. They claim the outpatient mental health provider used third-party tracking pixels on its website and improperly shared identifiable patient data with Meta and Google between March 2020 and April 2023.
The settlement will be finalized at an October 16 hearing before the U.S. District Court of Arizona. As part of the agreement, LifeStance must discontinue all use of third-party tracking pixels if any remain, according to court documents.
Third-party tracking pixels are invisible parts of a website’s HTML code that are the size of a 1×1 pixel dot on a screen. When a webpage loads, your digital device downloads the pixel asset from an external server and automatically collects and sends your IP address, information on pages visited, search history, and more to a third party.
“In the case of information collected by LifeStance and sent to Facebook, such information is then linked to users’ unique Facebook user ID, which allows Facebook and other third parties to personally identify those users and associate their private information with their Facebook profiles,” reads the complaint. “As a result, there is no anonymity in the information disclosed to Facebook for marketing and analytics purposes.”
The complaint alleges that LifeStance used the information from the tracking pixels to send targeted advertisements to users based on their private information and gain insights into how patients use its website. Even if a patient was not a Facebook user or had deleted their Facebook account, the complaint claims that “these individuals can find themselves in an even worse situation because when their private information is sent to Facebook, they cannot clear past activity or disconnect the collection of future activity since they do not have an account.”
LifeStance’s website pixels reportedly shared information including first and last names, birthdates, data on a patient accessing telehealth waiting rooms, where a user was located when doing so, the state the user lived in, searches for services and treatments, searches for therapists, and the text of URLs visited by the user.
LifeStance and its attorneys at Ropes and Gray LLP have denied the allegations throughout the lawsuit.