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Meta Faces Mounting Questions from Congress on Health Data Privacy As Hospitals Remove Facebook Tracker – The Markup [themarkup.org]:

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.

In June, The Markup reported [themarkup.org] that Meta Pixels on the websites of 33 of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America were transmitting the details of patients’ doctor’s appointments to Meta when patients booked on the websites. We also found Meta Pixels inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems collecting data about patients’ prescriptions, sexual orientation, and health conditions.

Former regulators told The Markup that the hospitals’ use of the pixel may have violated the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prohibitions against sharing protected health information.

“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.”

↩︎ linkSince The Markup’s Investigation:

• As of Sept. 15, 28 of the 33 hospitals have removed the Meta Pixel from their doctor booking pages or blocked it from sending patient information to Facebook. At least six of the seven health systems had also removed the pixels from their patient portals. The Markup reached out to the institutions who removed the pixel from their websites after our investigation published in June. As of press time, three institutions—Sanford Health, El Camino Health, and Henry Ford Health—had responded. Read their statements here [documentcloud.org].

• At least five class action lawsuits have been filed against Meta contending that the pixel’s data collection on hospital websites broke various state and federal laws. One, filed against the company [bloomberglaw.com] on behalf of a Baltimore-based MedStar Health System patient, claims that Meta Pixels collected patient information from at least 664 different hospitals’ websites. The other lawsuits were brought on behalf of patients of Novant Health [courtlistener.com] and hospitals in San Francisco [courtlistener.com], Los Angeles [courtlistener.com], and Chicago [courtlistener.com].

Original Submission