CVS Health
Health Care
69
out of 100. Number 48 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where CVS Health does well
- CVS honors a 60-day mailed opt-out from arbitration and even lets you reject future arbitration changes by mailed notice — many retailers offer no opt-out at all.
- Opting out of the sale/sharing of your data for targeted ads requires no account and CVS says it honors Global Privacy Control browser signals.
- Pharmacy rewards require an explicit written HIPAA marketing authorization before CVS can use your prescription information for rewards — it cannot use your prescription history for marketing without that opt-in.
- CVS stores ALPR (license-plate) data are deleted after 60 days, are never sold, and access is restricted to the Organized Retail Crime team.
- CVS promises it will not discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights, and gives you a right to appeal a denied privacy request.
- ExtraCare Plus sends a reminder email before your renewal date, lets you cancel online at any time, and benefits run through the end of the paid cycle after you cancel.
If CVS wrongs you, you cannot sue them in a real court, join a class action, or serve on a jury.
The fine print
6 clauses and findings from the draft archive, dated 1 October 2026. The plain English comes first; the small print is the company's own words. None of these has been checked yet.
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If CVS wrongs you, you cannot sue them in a real court, join a class action, or serve on a jury. Your only option is a private arbitration run by the National Arbitration and Mediation, one customer at a time.
YOU AND CVS AGREE THAT ANY PROCEEDING, WHETHER IN ARBITRATION OR IN LITIGATION IN COURT, WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT IN A CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. YOU AND CVS AGREE TO WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO BRING OR PARTICIPATE IN SUCH AN ACTION IN ARBITRATION OR IN COURT TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
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Before you can even file your arbitration claim, you must first mail CVS a detailed, personally-signed dispute notice and wait 60 days. And even if you mail a handwritten opt-out letter within 60 days, you still give up your right to a class action and a jury trial — you only escape the arbitration itself.
Compliance with this informal dispute resolution process is mandatory and a condition precedent to initiating arbitration. ... Opt-out. You have the right to opt out of arbitration by sending your personally signed, written notice ... postmarked within 60 days of the first time you agreed to terms with CVS that included an arbitration agreement. ... By opting out of arbitration, all other provisions in this Agreement, including the class action waiver and jury trial waiver, remain in effect.
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The paid ExtraCare Plus loyalty program ($5/month or $48/year) bills your card on a rolling basis and keeps billing until you cancel. Miss the cancellation window and you get zero refund for the rest of the term, and you can't cancel or get a refund at an actual CVS store.
Membership requires recurring charges to your payment card and automatically renews until canceled. ... No refunds for monthly or annual membership fees are provided for cancelation during the term of membership after the payment is processed. ExtraCare Plus memberships cannot be canceled or refunded in store.
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CVS admits it sells or shares (as California law defines 'sell') your identifiers, what you buy, what you browse, and where you roughly are, to ad networks and social media platforms so they can target ads at you. The site also records keystrokes, mouse movements, form entries, chat recordings, and your inputs to AI tools.
We may sell or share for targeted advertising certain categories of Personal Information, including online and other identifiers, commercial information, internet activity, and non-precise location information, with our business partners and third parties, including third party ad-network providers.
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CVS can rewrite the loyalty program rules whenever it likes — or shut down ExtraCare entirely — for any reason, without telling you first. Any rewards you were counting on can vanish with the program.
CVS reserves the right to change these Terms or any aspect of the ExtraCare Program at any time. ... CVS reserves the right to modify, suspend, or terminate, at its sole and absolute discretion, the ExtraCare Program in its entirety at any time, for any reason, without notice.
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Anything you post or submit to CVS.com becomes CVS's to reuse forever, for any purpose, even after you delete your account. But CVS can also permanently delete anything you submitted without warning you. You get neither control nor notice.
You hereby irrevocably grant to CVS an unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual, sublicensable (through multiple tiers), royalty-free license to use, reproduce, display publicly, perform, publish, transmit, distribute and otherwise exploit any communications or content you provide through the Services in any medium and for any purpose ... Any rights or licenses granted to CVS will survive termination. ... CVS may permanently destroy any content you submitted through the Services without any prior notice to you upon termination.
How these were found
Documents read directly from official CVS domains via browser_open (no mirrors used): (1) ExtraCare Terms & Conditions at https://www.cvs.com/ExtraCare/Free/Terms, stamped 'Last Updated: August 31, 2026'; (2) CVS Retail Terms of Use at https://www.cvs.com/retail/help/terms_of_use, stamped 'Last Updated: September 04, 2026'; (3) CVS Privacy Policy at https://www.cvs.com/help/privacy_policy, stamped 'LAST UPDATED: July 1, 2026'; (4) CVS California Notice at Collection at https://www.cvs.com/retail/help/ca_notice_collection (used for the sell/share table, read via search-result snippets from cvs.com); (5) ExtraCare help/FAQ page at https://www.cvs.com/retail/help/help-subtopic-help-with-extracare (used for ExtraCare Plus auto-renew/no-refund language, read via search-result snippets from cvs.com). All quotes are verbatim from these documents. No Aetna or other CVS Health subsidiary terms were reviewed; pharmacy/HIPAA-side terms may add further findings. The CVS Retail Terms of Use search index also surfaced an older version with more aggressive deletion-on-termination language; the findings above use the current September 2026 version only.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.