The news: Popular health websites are sharing private, personal medical data with big tech companies, according to an investigation by the Financial Times. The data, including medical diagnoses, symptoms, prescriptions, and menstrual and fertility information, are being sold to companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Oracle and smaller data brokers and advertising technology firms, like Scorecard and OpenX.
The investigation: The FT analyzed 100 health websites, including WebMD, Healthline, health insurance group Bupa, and parenting site Babycentre, and found that 79% of them dropped cookies on visitors, allowing them to be tracked by third-party companies around the internet. This was done without consent, making the practice illegal under European Union regulations. By far the most common destination for the data was Google’s advertising arm DoubleClick, which showed up in 78% of the sites the FT tested.
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A window into a broken industry: This sort of rampant rule -breaking has been a dirty secret in the advertising technology industry, which is worth $200 billion globally, ever since EU countries adopted the General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018. A recent inquiry by the UK’s data regulator found that the sector is rife with illegal practices, as in this case where privacy policies did not adequately outline which data would be shared with third parties or what it would be used for. The onus is now on EU and UK authorities to act to put an end to them.
Navy Vet
Article URL : https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614708/health-websites-are-sharing-sensitive-medical-data-with-google-facebook-and-amazon/