Meta Faces Lawsuit Over Collecting Health Information for Targeted Ads
Facebook’s parent Meta is facing a class-action lawsuit that claims the company has been harvesting users’ sensitive health information through patient portals online for the purposes of targeted advertising.
The lawsuit(Opens in a new window) comes from an anonymous user, “Jane Doe,” who alleges Meta began serving her targeted ads related to her medical condition after she used the patient portals at The University of California, San Francisco Medical Center (UCSF) and Dignity Health. BleepingComputer was first to report(Opens in a new window) the news.
The lawsuit focuses on an advertising tool from Facebook’s parent called Meta Pixel(Opens in a new window). The system acts as a snippet of JavaScript computer code that companies can embed on their websites. In return, Meta Pixel can track user “conversions” to Facebook ads, to judge whether visitors are really clicking on them.
The tool can also let companies see what actions visitors are taking over a website, such as adding an item to their shopping cart, or when a search is being made. However, the lawsuit alleges the same tool can allow Meta “to surreptitiously gather every user interaction” with a website, since user consent is never asked.
“Alarmingly, Meta Pixel is incorporated on websites that are used to store and convey sensitive medical information intended to stay private. For example, Meta Pixel is embedded on the websites of 33 of the top 100 hospitals in America,” the lawsuit says, citing an investigation(Opens in a new window) from The Markup, which focused on the potential privacy violations of Meta Pixel back in June.
The complaint then goes on to claim Meta’s pixel technology can collect information about a patient’s health conditions, diagnoses,
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