The Meta Pixel tracker was exposed many years ago for its nefarious practices of obtaining health-related information about patients from hospital websites, and I wrote about it here on June 25, 2022.
However, Meta/Facebook was not the only bad actor. Google and many other companies had also been known to “wiretap” hospital websites to collect protected health information (PHI). As a result, the Office of Civil Rights issued statements on the matter, along with warnings to hospital systems about the use of these online tracking technologies. I wrote about it here on July 23, 2023.
To summarize the legal issues, there is a healthcare-specific law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which prohibits healthcare providers from sharing PHI with third parties. This law appears to have been repeated violated by the implementation of tracking technologies on hospital websites.
Yesterday I received a Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement in which Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. reached a proposed settlement of claims related to their disclosure of patients’ confidential personal information due to third-party software code. The Consolidated Master Class Action Complaint specifically mentions Quantum Metric, Twitter, Adobe, Microsoft Bing, and Google as “Third Party Wiretappers” on paragraph 4 (page 2) and states that it is not limited to just these companies.
In paragraph 261 (page 74), it specifically mentions that Meta/Facebook and Google Analytics have been implicated in this specific tracking activity of personal health information.
There have been other lawsuits against other healthcare delivery organizations and resultant settlements. I used ChatGPT to help me identify some of them which include University of Tennessee Medical Center & Margaret Mary Community Hospital, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, Louisiana Children’s Medical Center, Reid Health, MarinHealth, and Eisenhower Medical Center to name some lawsuits in which Meta Pixel was specifically implicated. I have not done comprehensive research, but I suspect that there are many others in which other third party wiretappers are named. If you were a Kaiser patient between November 2017 and May 2024, and if you haven’t received notification about the Kaiser Privacy Breach Settlement, visit https://kaiserprivacysettlement.com to learn more.
