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mahatmakanejeeves

(57,621 posts)
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 10:25 AM Jun 2022

Hospitals Are Sharing Sensitive Info With Facebook

Hat tip, Joe.My.God.

Hospitals Are Sharing Sensitive Info With Facebook
June 16, 2022

Ars Technica reports:

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.


Read the full article.

There’s much more. So creepy.


13 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Hospitals Are Sharing Sensitive Info With Facebook (Original Post) mahatmakanejeeves Jun 2022 OP
MAY HAVE VIOLATED HIPAA??? MAY HAVE???? How in the F'n HELL is that niyad Jun 2022 #1
Seriously Native Jun 2022 #2
for real for real. irisblue Jun 2022 #6
WTF. dalton99a Jun 2022 #3
FB needs to get ahead of this. J_William_Ryan Jun 2022 #4
Reposting: Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access usonian Jun 2022 #5
Thanks, usonian. calimary Jun 2022 #7
My God, this is beyond horrible! Lonestarblue Jun 2022 #8
KnR to read later Hekate Jun 2022 #9
Shiiiit! SpankMe Jun 2022 #10
Then there are those glorious slickly produced Facebook ads on TV halfulglas Jun 2022 #11
Holy crap. ismnotwasm Jun 2022 #12
Install Ghostery in your browser and be amazed dickthegrouch Jun 2022 #13

J_William_Ryan

(1,758 posts)
4. FB needs to get ahead of this.
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 11:51 AM
Jun 2022

Republican prosecutors will subpoena FB for the medial information of women suspected of terminating their pregnancies.

usonian

(9,899 posts)
5. Reposting: Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 12:15 PM
Jun 2022

Other than the obvious, that Facebook is a curse, with no regard to the damage it does until caught.
I am not sure if ad-blockers that block the Facebook "bug" on sites is enough to stop this, and even so, it's a moving target. I can check and update. I have recommended the TAILS distro ( https://tails.boum.org)* to whistleblowers and endangered journalists. But seriously, the average person should not have to resort to such measures for basic protections.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access
CC BY license, https://www.eff.org/copyright "You do NOT have to ask permission to post original EFF material on a mailing list or newsgroup"

Legislation deputizing people to find, sue, and collect damages from anyone who tries to help people seeking abortion care creates serious digital privacy and security risks for those involved in abortion access. Patients, their family members and friends, doctors, nurses, clinic staff, reproductive rights activists, abortion rights counselors and website operators, insurance providers, and even drivers who help take patients to clinics may face grave risks to their privacy and safety. Other legislation that does not depend on deputizing “bounty hunters,” but rather criminalizes abortion, presents even more significant risks.

Those targeted by anti-abortion laws can, if they choose, take steps to better protect their privacy and security. Though there is no one-size-fits-all digital security solution, some likely risks are clear. One set of concerns involves law enforcement and state actors, who may have expensive and sophisticated surveillance technology at their disposal, as well as warrants and subpoenas. Because of this, using non-technical approaches in combination with technical ones may be more effective at protecting yourself. Private actors in states with "bounty laws" may also try to enlist a court's subpoena power (to seek information associated with your ISP address, for example, or other data that might be collected by the services you use). But it may still be easier to protect yourself from this “private surveillance” using technical approaches. This guide will cover some of each.

Developing risk awareness and a routine of keeping your data private and secure takes practice. Whether the concern is over digital surveillance, like tracking what websites you’ve visited, or attempts to obtain personal communications using the courts, it’s good to begin by thinking at a high level about ways you can improve your overall security and keep your online activities private. Then, as you come to understand the potential scope of risks you may face, you can narrow in on the tools and techniques that are the best fit for your concerns. Here are some high-level tips to help you get started. We recommend pairing them with some specific guides we’ve highlighted here. To be clear, it is virtually impossible to devise a perfect security strategy—but good practices can help.

1: Compartmentalization


In essence, this is doing your best to keep more sensitive activities separate from your day-to-day ones. Compartmentalizing your digital footprint can include developing the habit of never reusing passwords, having separate browsers for different purposes, and backing up sensitive data onto external drives.

Recommendations:

Use different browsers for different use cases. More private browsers like DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Firefox are better for more sensitive activities. Keeping separate browsers can protect against accidental data spillover from one aspect of your life into another.
Use a secondary email address and/or phone number to register sensitive accounts or give to contacts with whom you don’t want to associate too closely. Google Voice is a free secondary phone number. Protonmail and Tutanota are free email services that offer many privacy protections that more common providers like Gmail do not, such as end-to-end encryption when emailing others also on Protonmail and Tutanota, and fewer embedded tracking mechanisms on the service itself.
Use a VPN when you need to dissociate your internet connection from what you’re doing online. Be wary of VPN products that sell themselves as cure-all solutions.
If you're going to/from a location that's more likely to have increased surveillance, or if you're particularly worried about who might know you're there, turning off your devices or their location services can help keep your location private.

2: Community Agreements

It’s likely that others in your community share your digital privacy concerns. Deciding for yourself what information is safer to share with your community, then coming together to decide what kind of information cannot be shared outside the group, is a great nontechnical way to address many information security problems. Think of it in three levels: what information should you share with nobody? What information is OK to share with a smaller, more trusted group? And what information is fine to share publicly?

Recommendations:

Come up with special phrases to mask sensitive communications.
Push a culture of consent when it comes to sharing data about one another, be it pictures, personal information, and so on. Asking for permission first is a good way to establish trust and communication with each other.
Agree to communicate with each other on more secure platforms like Signal, or offline.

3: Safe Browsing

There are many ways that data on your browser can undermine your privacy and security, or be weaponized against you. Limiting unwanted tracking and reducing the likelihood that data from different aspects of your life spills into one another is a great way to layer on more protection.

Recommendations:

Install privacy-preserving browser extensions on any browsers you use. Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, and DuckDuckGo are great options.
Use a privacy-focused search engine, like DuckDuckGo.
Carefully look at the privacy settings on each app and account you use. Turn off location services on phone apps that don’t need them. Raise the bar on privacy settings for most, if not all, your online accounts.
Disable the ad identifier on mobile devices. Ad IDs are specifically designed to facilitate third-party tracking, and disabling them makes it harder to profile you. Instructions for Android devices are here, and for iOS devices here.
Choose a browser that’s more private by design. DuckDuckGo on mobile and Firefox (with privacy settings turned up) on the desktop are both good options.

4: Security Checklists

Make a to-do list of tools, techniques, and practices to use when you are doing anything that requires a bit more care when it comes to digital privacy and security. This is not only good to have so that you don’t forget anything, but is extremely helpful when you find yourself in a more high-stress situation, where trying to remember these things is far from the top of your mind.

Recommendations:

Tools: VPNs for hiding your location and circumventing local internet censorship, encrypted messaging apps for avoiding surveillance, and anonymized credit cards for keeping financial transactions separate from your day-to-day persona.
Strategies: use special code words with trusted people to hide information in plain sight; check in with someone via encrypted chat when you are about to do something sensitive; turn off location services on your cell phone before going somewhere, and back up and remove sensitive data from your main device.

* Tails is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship.

Lonestarblue

(10,085 posts)
8. My God, this is beyond horrible!
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 12:45 PM
Jun 2022

Reading the full article gave me chills. My local healthcare providers use MyChart, and now I’m wondering whether every vaccination, every healthcare visit gets sent to Facebook. I have nothing to be concerned about because of good health, but it’s still an enormous invasion of privacy. The article stated that many businesses use the Meta Pixel to track website uses to see what they click on so that targeted ads can be displayed on their next visit or to their Facebook pages. But why does any hospital need to track people to send advertising to them?

Big tech is out of control in the US, and they’re stomping privacy rights left and right. The ability to track women seeking an abortion is especially frightening given Republicans’ wish to track them to prevent them exercising any rights. And once Roe is gone, each state will track every woman of reproductive age.

Another company that people should be aware of is Palantir. One of its founders is Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s and Republicans’ biggest financial supporters and about as right wing extremist as they come. The company was funded in part by the CIA, and it has extensive data analytics capabilities. They are so secretive that few people even know the kinds of data they collect and on whom. They were in the news just recently because they are bidding to take over the patient information portion of the NHS, a big concern for many people who fear to whom they will sell sensitive medical information. If they get the NHS contract, they may very well also try to move into Medicare and other US programs to track us all cradle to grave and sell our privacy to the highest bidder.

I’ve included a link to an article about Palantir, but a line in the article caught my attention. “… the CIA became a Palantir customer in 2005 for their intelligence analytics services, (2) and their venture capital arm In-Q-Tel was publicly listed as having an equity stake in the company by mid-2006.” The CIA has a venture capital arm?!!!

Here’s the article.

https://www.waronwethepeople.com/a-pretty-complete-history-of-palantir/

SpankMe

(2,969 posts)
10. Shiiiit!
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 01:10 PM
Jun 2022

We need some sort of federal law allowing people to opt out of ALL tracking.

If someone decided not to use the Internet at all, and depend on phone, wood pulp paper and shopping in person to conduct all of their life's business, I'm not sure that's even possible. Unless you're homeless, you have to use the internet for some things.

So, there needs to be some sort of grant, unified opt-out scheme.

halfulglas

(1,654 posts)
11. Then there are those glorious slickly produced Facebook ads on TV
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 01:18 PM
Jun 2022

Featuring a charming young woman patting themselves on the back about the tremendous job they are doing.

dickthegrouch

(3,184 posts)
13. Install Ghostery in your browser and be amazed
Fri Jun 17, 2022, 09:09 PM
Jun 2022

I have used ghostery for many years to try to prevent some of this crap.
Almost every page I visit has a googleanalytics connector and a googletagmanager connector.
And I gave up complaining to the sites that enable it because they invariably didn't understand the implications, even though it's a clear violation of their own data sharing and/or privacy policy.

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