Nearly all 20 US government-run health insurance marketplaces have shared resident application information with advertising and tech giants including Google, LinkedIn, Meta and Snap, according to new Bloomberg research.
The report addresses privacy concerns created by pixel-sized trackers, which allow website owners to collect information about their visitors, often for web analytics and debugging. A common tool in digital advertising, these trackers also allow the collection of personal information if misconfigured and placed on websites containing sensitive content such as healthcare data.
According to Bloomberg, New York’s health insurance exchange shared information with several tech companies about an individual’s application, including whether they provided details about whether they have incarcerated family members.
The health insurance exchange for Washington, DC also asked residents about the person’s gender and race, which TikTok’s pixel tracker attempted to correct. Some races were covered and others were not, the report said. A spokesperson for the Washington, DC exchange told Bloomberg that the email address, phone number and country identifiers were also shared with TikTok.
Washington, D.C. suspended the TikTok tracker and Virginia removed the Meta tracker from its website after Bloomberg found it shared residents’ zip codes with the tech giant.
This is not a new problem, and in the past it has attracted telehealth startups and healthcare giants alike. Several companies and healthcare giants have had to notify millions that they accidentally collected and shared their health information with tech giants, whose profits come from using consumer data for advertising.
But Bloomberg research shows that these pixel trackers can affect large segments of the population when placed on government websites. The publication noted that more than seven million Americans purchased health insurance for this year through a state health insurance exchange.
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