- Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties.
- Not all sites had privacy policies and of those that did, only 56% disclosed specific third parties receiving data.
- Google and Meta (through Facebook Pixel) were on nearly every site and received the most data. Adobe, Verizon, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon also received data.
- Common data shared included IP addresses, browser info, pages visited, referring site.
- Sharing data poses privacy risks for visitors and legal/regulatory risks for hospitals if policies don’t comply with laws.
- A class action lawsuit against Mass General Brigham and Dana-Farber resulted in an $18.4M settlement over sharing patient data.
- Researcher calls for hospitals to collaborate with computer science departments to design more private websites. Also recommends privacy tools to block third party tracking.
But in the meantime, and in lieu of any federal data privacy law in the US, protecting personal information falls to the individual. And for that, Friedman recommends browser-based tools Ghostery and Privacy Badger, which identify and block transfers to third-party domains. “It impacts your browsing experience almost none,” he explained. “It’s free. And you will be shocked at how much tracking is actually happening, and how much data is actually flowing to third parties.”
Note: Although Friedman recommends Ghostery and Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin is generally considered a better privacy-enhancing browser extension. Additionally, there exist multiple approaches for adblocking and tracker blocking beyond the browser extension model.
That is definitely some scary shit, thank you. That also piggybacks onto another thought I had, my partner insists on google chrome for everything. (He is a pc and android user). I stay away from google anything and would think because he SAYS he cares about what’s collected, and he admits he isn’t a techie, but then doesn’t want to hear it from me when I say use something Mozilla based and ublock. But nothing is safe anymore. I do use voyager. :)
I ditched chrome (chromium + google propriety spyware) some years ago in favor of Brave browser (chromium + Brave stuff). It was a decent user experience but Brave also does some shady stuff, which you can google easily if interested.
Last year, google poisoned chromium with DRM stuff. They rolled back the changes after a few months but the damage was already done. I, and many others, jumped ship to Firefox and other non-chromium based browsers. Firefox isn’t perfect, but it’s an excellent browser. I’m sticking with it for the foreseeable future. And absolutely use uBlock Origin. Between that and proton VPN features, I don’t see ads anymore. It’s fantastic.