Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites; Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information

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Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites

“A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.”

“The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020, according to the most recent data available from the American Hospital Association. Our investigation was limited to just over 100 hospitals; the data sharing likely affects many more patients and institutions than we identified.”