US hospitals forwarded patient data to Meta

Until recently, trackers were installed on the websites and portals of at least 33 American hospitals that sent patient data to Facebook. That writes The Markup. The social media company received details about doctor’s appointments, allergies and illnesses.

The journalistic organization Themarkup examined the top 100 US hospitals that Newsweek compiled and found that 33 of those hospitals had a tracking pixel from Facebook’s parent company Meta installed on their website. That pixel, the Meta Pixel, in some cases collected the name of a doctor with whom a patient wanted to make an appointment, as well as the medical search term that the internet user searched for on the hospital’s website, according to The Markup. In other cases, the possible disease, which patients could indicate in a drop-down menu, was also sent to Meta.

According to The Markup, the tracking pixel was also installed in seven online patient portals that can only be accessed with a username and password. In five of the seven cases, the names of medications were sent along with descriptions of allergic reactions and information about future doctor’s appointments. In total, these 33 hospitals forwarded more than 26 million records of patient admissions and outpatient visits to Meta in 2020, according to The Markup.

According to privacy experts, these hospitals may have broken a US law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. That law states that US hospitals may not share patient data with third parties if it is not anonymized. This is only allowed if a patient has given explicit and prior consent. According to The Markup, the hospitals do not have such patient consents.

At the time of writing, seven out of 33 hospitals have removed Meta’s tracking pixel. The social media company states in a response that it removes privacy-sensitive health data if it has been incorrectly forwarded by users of Meta Business Tools.

Seven US hospitals had added a Meta Pixel to their online patient portal. Source: The Markup