bad news for Goal. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has been sued by violating the privacy of patients from different hospitals via the Meta Pixel tracker. as collected TheVergethese are two individual lawsuits that intend to become collective to represent all those possibly affected by the situation.
The existence of Meta Pixel and its use on health center websites was discovered last June. A report of The Markup indicated that 33 of the top 100 US hospitals used such a tracker on their websites. But what was worse was that it was also being used to extract password-protected medical information. And although this only happened in seven establishments, the data that the parent company of Facebook was collecting was really sensitive.
We not only talk about each patient’s consultation schedule with their doctors or specialists, but also more private data such as the diseases they were experiencing and allergies to certain medications.
It is worth mentioning that, although both lawsuits charge against Meta, only one also points against the hospitals where the care was provided. Specifically, mention is made of University of California San Francisco Medical Center Yet the Dignity Health Medical Foundation.
One of the lawsuits ensures that those of Menlo Park have designed their tracker to receive information on all the actions that a patient can perform on the website of the health centers that include it. This ranges from registering and logging in, to more specific issues such as managing a medical appointment.
Meta, in the eye of the storm by Pixel, your tracker
The patient who is carrying out one of the lawsuits against Meta assured that, after undergoing studies and receiving diagnoses for heart and joint problems, started seeing ads related to those conditions. This happened in both the Facebook feed and stories. But that was not all, since she also received multiple advertising emails in the same box that she used to register on the social network.
The lawyers representing both plaintiffs indicate that the Meta Pixel case is a clear violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, known as HIPAA in the United States. It establishes that the personal information of patients cannot be transferred by health institutions without their express consent.
In any case, we will have to see how this situation progresses and with what speed. As they are class action proposals, it will be a judge who will finally decide whether or not to grant that status to the two presentations.
The case of the Meta Pixel tracker puts Mark Zuckerberg and company back in the center of the scene for controversies of this type. Let’s not forget that a short time ago it was also exposed that Facebook was bombarding cancer patients with ads for dubious treatments, due to failures in the automated moderation system of its advertising platform.