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: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:25PM
If you have people who list you as a contact (via WhatsApp, or FriendFace, or now whatever 3D gimmick they are going for) then their healthcare data reflects entirely on you. Because if your contacts have bad health, probability is that you have bad health; and whatever optimisation routines/machine learning/Artificial Stupidity the insurance companies use to drive their pricing will surely pick up on this, if they have not already.
Same goes for financials and everything else...