Hospitals — despite being places where people implicitly expect to keep their personal information private — often use tracking technology on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers and other third parties, according to research published today.
How medical websites share your data | FT
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals—mainly traditional hospitals with emergency departments—and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transferred user data to third parties.
Furthermore, not all of these sites even had a privacy policy. And of the 71 percent that did, 56 percent disclosed specific third-party companies that could receive user information.
"It's shocking and really incomprehensible," said Dr. Ari Friedman, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who — along with Matthew McCoy, Angela Wu, Sam Burdyl, Yungjee Kim, Noell Kristen Smith and Rachel Gonzales — wrote the paper.
