All too often, Digital advertising ends up improperly targeting the most vulnerable people online, including abuse victim and children. Adding to that list were customers of several genetic testing and digital medicine companies, whose websites used advertising tracking tools that could reveal information about their health status. everyone’s health.
In one recent research from researchers at Duke University and patient privacy focus group Light Collective, 10 patient advocates active in the genetic cancer community and cancer support groups on Facebook — three of which are Facebook group admins — downloaded and analyzed their data from the platform “Turn off activity on Facebook” feature in September and October. This tool shows information that third parties are sharing with Facebook, and its parent company, Meta, about your activity on other apps and websites. Along with the retail and media sites that often appear in these reports, the researchers found that a number of genetic testing and digital medicine companies shared customer information with the man. social media giant for ad targeting.
Deeper analysis of those sites — using tracker identification tools like the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger and The Markup’s Black light—Verified ad technology modules that companies have embedded on their websites. The researchers then examined the companies’ privacy policies to see if they allowed and disclosed this type of tracking across many of these sites and the data stream that could lead to Facebook. In three of the five cases, the companies’ policies did not have clear language about third-party tools that could be used to retarget or redefine users across the web for marketing.
“My reaction was shock when I realized there were major omissions in these policies,” said Andrea Downing, study co-author, independent security researcher and president of Light Collective. “And when we talked to some of these companies, it seemed like they didn’t fully understand the ad technology they were using. So this needs to be a wake-up call.”
Study and study co-author Eric Perakslis, director of science and digital at Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute, stressed that while targeted advertising is an ambiguous ecosystem, but monitoring can have particular implications for patient populations. For example, in the process of redefining users across multiple sites, third-party tracking tools may collect information about the user’s health and build a broader profile of interests, occupation, device fingerprint and their geographic area. And the interconnectedness of the advertising ecosystem means that this composite picture is capable of pulling information from all types of web browsing, including activity on sites like Facebook. A good example is ads that invasively target pregnant women and others consistent face based on marketers’ assumptions about their state of health.
“The question in this trial was, ‘Can patients trust the terms and conditions they agree to on health-related websites? And if they can’t, do companies know they can’t? ‘” Perakslis said. “And many of the companies we reviewed are not HIPAA-insured entities, so this health-related data exists in an almost entirely unregulated space. Research has repeatedly shown that such information flows for advertising can disproportionately harm vulnerable populations. “
Of course, the vast majority of users click through the terms of service and privacy policies without actually reading them. But researchers say this is all the more reason to shed light on how digital ad targeting, lead generation and cross-site tracking can erode user privacy.
