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from the ask-me-no-questions-and-I'll-tell-you-no-lies dept.
Meta is facing mounting questions about its access to sensitive medical data following a Markup investigation that found the company's pixel tracking tool collecting details about patients' doctor's appointments, prescriptions, and health conditions on hospital websites.
During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) requested that Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—provide a "comprehensive and precise" accounting of the medical information it keeps on users.
[...] In response to Ossoff's question about whether Meta has medical or health care data about its users, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox responded, "Not to my knowledge." Cox also promised to follow up with a written response to the committee.
[...] "Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools," Meta spokesperson Dale Hogan wrote to The Markup in an emailed statement. "Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect."
Meanwhile, developments in another legal case suggest Meta may have a hard time providing the Senate committee with a complete account of the sensitive health data it holds on users.
In March, two Meta employees testifying in a case about the Cambridge Analytica scandal told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that it would be very difficult for the company to track down all the data associated with a single user account.
[...] The engineers' comments echo the same worries expressed in a 2021 privacy memo written by Facebook engineers that was leaked to Vice.
"We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose,' " the memo's authors wrote.
Previously:
Meta Faces Lawsuit for Allegedly Collecting Patient Health Data Without Consent
Facebook is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information From Hospital Websites – the Markup
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 25 2022, @09:16AM (3 children)
Then they should design their tools so that no sucking of information through them is possible. Oh wait, stealing private information is their business model; it's just that they want to avoid that part of the information that could land them in legal trouble (or at least, they want to appear avoiding them).
The adequate level would be: "We don't read any data you don't explicitly give to us, and we only use the data you give us in ways you obviously intended them to be used." Easy to formulate, easy to implement, easy to control.
Anything beyond that is data theft.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 25 2022, @01:26PM (2 children)
Don't call this "theft", call it "stalking", or perhaps "voyeurism" or "privacy violation" or "snooping". I'd go for "mass digital stalking" myself.
What they do with all this info is gossip about it, for $. But there are obviously darker uses. Health info can be particularly sensitive. Most animals try to hide injury and illness. Don't want predators to know at a glance that they are easy prey. I've tried to be careful by not much using FB myself, however, I have found that strategy to be of limited effectiveness thanks to loose lipped relatives and friends. Another strategy is to use cash especially at places such as the drugstore. But the way our medical system works, if you need a prescription, you were already compromised before you walked through the door.
I find it alarming that enemies and opportunists can so easily acquire the sorts of details that lend themselves to exploitation and abuse. One of the possibilities that concerns me somewhat is whether violence inclined fascists could be compiling lists of people they consider to be traitors, and whether I and my family and friends might be put on such a list. We're not quite to the point of having to wear yellow Stars of David. But now, there's little need for such crude measures. To virtually mark people, likely there are apps for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2022, @05:52PM
The mark (number) [wikipedia.org] of the beast [biblestudytools.com].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stretch611 on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:34PM
How true this is...
A few months ago I was in my Primary care doctor's office. I was asked by the nurse what drug a specialist had prescribed me. I could not remember the name so she logged in to my insurance carrier's website, looked it up, and got a complete list of every drug that I had filled with my insurance plan. As an IT professional, I was not surprised and this merely confirmed what I expected.
This is why we have and need HIPAA laws. (And truthfully why they should be expanded for better privacy protection rights)
If you get a prescription it is going into a ton of databases including...
- the drug store/chain
- your insurance carrier
- your doctor
- your credit card company
- that "free" drug savings card you picked up to find "cheap" drugs
- your state government (In theory to only look to make sure you don't abuse certain prescriptions and things like pseudophedrine... in theory)
Good Luck avoiding all those databases as well... Unless you are filthy rich how are you ever going to pay for an expensive prescription without an insurance plan, savings card, and/or credit card?
And have you noticed that every single one of those drug cards to make you pay as little as $5/month for a co-pay ALWAYS ask for your social security number?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P