Facebook is receiving sensitive medical information from hospital websites
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
Should the hospitals have been better so this sensitive data doesn't get to Facebook? Yes.
But we cannot excuse the privacy invasive practices of Facebook and Google (I would be shocked if google was not also getting this data somehow).
And this is not just hospital data, it is certain sensitive apps (I really don't need or want Facebook to know every time I open Grindr), nearly every single thing we do these companies find a way to find out because they weasel their way in by offering some helpful feature that a developer would want to use.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
>Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
Fines for a single act like this, should be multiple times higher than whatever posible income they could get by gathering data like this.
Why has invading users privacy become normal? While Facebook and Google are the largest, it has become common that smaller companies are doing this to pad their bottom line.
As developers we should be pushing back on this. Not using these tools from Facebook and Google that just grow their grip on the web. The tools that invade user privacy in completely invisible ways.
I usually don't believe in regulation, but here is an obvious case for regulation... Does company/app legitimately need data X for the app/service to work? No? Then it's not allowed to collect, store and resell that data. If it does, it should be fined way more, than the data is worth. Did they collect the data for one thing (eg. location data for playing pokemon go) and are using it for another (ad targeting)... agian, a huge fine.
It is just more being sad we are at this point.
Every time I see this I chuckle. The first public companies ever created had just two lines of business: selling drugs and selling slaves.
The only reason they ever stopped, was because government stepped in. The expectation that developers can do something is delusional, you need men with guns- I suppose some vigilante citizen militia could also work though.
This post is 45 minutes old and is almost now on page 2 of hacker news. Shit like this has become the norm! We don't think about it anymore. That is a huge problem. We cannot allow this to be the normal!
Ultimately we are the ones that built these tools. Use them.
I know the post rank isn't everything, but people just seem to not care anymore. We should be the ones that care the most because we actually understand (at least more of it) that this is happening in the first place and how it works. But also the dangers of things like this being moved to server side and completely hidden if nothing is done.
We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.
I hope you're not one of the weirdos who likes to contradict people and say we are all fooling ourselves and the algorithm knows all.
It is inevitable when society promotes "fiduciary duty" and "I got mine" as apex values for corporates and individuals, respectively. Unfettered selfishness cannot get to a globally optimal solution, despite what any free market zealots may tell you.
The collective good is out of fashion - it has been for a long time, TBH, but now it is unapologetically so.
Was the response I got when I explained the issue with Google Analytics in patient portals.
In most cases these same clients never even look at the analytics as the dashboard is too confusing and generating reports too cumbersome.
Most (all?) of which could be developed on their own of course, but that costs more than a one liner to set up Google Analytics.
And again, none of this info was ever actually used. They just felt very strongly that they needed it to better understand their users and improve the experience at some far off future date.
I can't speak to why the consequences weren't more obvious. I don't know. I do know that Epic cares deeply about this and I know that it pisses me off that this happens. But the tech people at hospitals are people and make mistakes. They're likely driven by the business needs and don't have time to fully vet everything.
I think this is a consequence of the American health system and want to implement these products to increase profitability.
Edit: I didn't read far enough into the story. I see that Epic was mentioned by name.
I stand by my assertion that it's on the EHR vendor. Did those hospitals specifically enable the private health data be sent?
This includes the pages to contact my doctor, view test results or even the feedback link for my complaint.
They played dumb for a while, but finally said "the website is a convenience". They also would not delete my account.
OTOH with that knowledge Facebook might probably want to filter certain keys and values
This isn't a case where a tool made for legitimate purposes is being misused, it's a case where the tool has no legitimate purpose.
You can track advertising effectiveness yourself by having all your ads point to a unique URL with some query parameter (“campaign_id=123”) which preserves the privacy of everyone. FB can stalk their users on their own properties but at least non-FB users are protected from it.
When I search whoisdomain "w55c.net" I find it is owned by Roku, Inc. 150 Winchester Circle Los Gatos, CA.
Am I doing this wrong or is the tracking pixel in my local hospital sending data to ... Roku... the company that make the little streaming box I have hooked up to my TV.
You can opt out here (ctrl f “ad personalization”): https://docs.roku.com/published/userprivacypolicy/en/US#:~:t....
Or global opt out (do this on all of your devices): https://optout.aboutads.info/?c=2&lang=EN
> “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.’ ” Facebook engineers on the ad and business product team wrote in a 2021 privacy overview that was leaked to Vice.
Open the network tab and there's a lot of gstatic network connections.
Worryingly, I saw requests (that ublock stopped) to https://exponea.com/, dc.services.visualstudio.com/v2/track, and googletagmanager, _and_ if I book an appointment it sends the details of the booking to the analytics service... that's pretty horiffic.
> The ruling directs the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of €250,000 for each violation, or up to six months in prison, for continued improper use of Google Fonts.
Okay, so we don't serve fonts from google-ish domains. We know server from freefontswithtracking.com a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet! See, no longer serving fonts from Googs. /s
Balkanisation has been a concern for some time mostly because of government regulations in different jurisdictions that conflict.
However if a site can't import any externally hosted resources without getting explicit consent first then that breaks CDNs, payment services that require you to use their versions of scripts for security and/or regulatory reasons, services that host content where providing locally hosted alternatives might not be practical such as video or audio files or mapping data, and the list goes on.
Some reasonable middle ground is clearly needed here. Perhaps there could be some reasonable standard for privacy that those external services can meaningfully promise to maintain and then some sort of safe harbour provision where importing resources from privacy-respecting sources is acceptable. Of course that only works if services that promise to respect privacy and then don't will be hit with meaningful sanctions but the same is true of any obligations under GDPR and other privacy laws today.
CDNs are already broken unfortunately. Both Firefox and Chrome use per-site caches [0].
> payment services that require you to use their versions of scripts for security, services that host content where providing locally hosted alternatives might not be practical such as video or audio files or mapping data, and the list goes on.
That's reasonable, and the GDPR doens't stop you from doing that, but it does mean that you must tell the user that you're loading it from a third party, ask permission to do so, and list the data that you're sharing with that party in exchange for them providing those resources.
[0] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/
But many sites serve their own resources via a CDN for performance and resilience reasons. The major CDNs have the capability to record a lot of history about where systems reachable at a certain IP address have been visiting online. And of course it's impossible for a site that works that way to ask your permission before doing so because it has no way to communicate with you first. The same is true for other services like DNS.
That's reasonable, and the GDPR doens't stop you from doing that, but it does mean that you must tell the user that you're loading it from a third party, ask permission to do so, and list the data that you're sharing with that party in exchange for them providing those resources.
Which is the problem. The logical end result would be like the "cookie consent" junk but much worse. Do we really want a WWW where every service someone encounters needs explicit permission to do its job even if that job is simply to send some generic information to the IP address that requested it? Are we all going to have to download the DNS records for the entire Internet to our local systems every few minutes as well? What about other things we do online that necessarily involving remote servers, like sending an email? Does every system involved in forwarding a message I send to a dozen friends now have to contact me (how?!) and obtain my permission before forwarding the message to the next link in the chain?
There ought to be some reasonable limits to protect privacy. I don't think a website for a medical facility should automatically use Google Maps to show a route from a patient's home address to their facility. But in that case the information request on the user's behalf is much more specific. It's not just the user at 127.0.0.1 visiting some (unknown) site that uses a popular web font for its text and the user's browser then fetches the relevant data from Google Fonts without asking first.
That's as good a teaser as I've ever seen
1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/07/oracle-quietly-closes-28b-...
Fucking disgusting.
Facebook now alerts you if you're sending what looks like PII to them in the query string, e.g. parameters named "first_name", but after extensive Googling I couldn't find any way to tell the FB code to strip off the query string before sending conversion events back to the mothership.
It's not exactly easy, but with Google Analytics it's at least possible to redact the URL before it gets attached to the transmitted event.
The only thing I could think of was to do for Facebook was to use a redirect (or the History API) to strip the query off the URL before loading the FB pixel, but this will break any other embeds that are relying on query params for e.g. form-filling.
It's like letting a burglar in your home after asking them not to rob you.
Maybe just not let the burglar enter in the first place?
Anyone know what they are talking about? (and getting wrong in some way one way or another).
> Neither the hospitals nor Meta said they had such contracts in place, and The Markup found no evidence that the hospitals or Meta were otherwise obtaining patients’ express consent.
I mean, aside from Facebook, how do you think people do medical research? Data sets are available to the public.
Decades ago, somebody showed that deidentification was completely meaningless because with just a few data points almost everybody can be relinked.
You are probably the only person in your zip code, with your gender, and your birthdate (including the year).
Distributing that information with any medical record you ever had is not prevented by anything I know of. As long as your name and SSN is not with it.