Ad Tracking on Kaiser Permanente’s Patient Health Portal

I’m so glad Bill Fitzgerald has written up his observations on this and will be following up.

Bill writes:

Last night, I logged onto the Kaiser Permanente patient health portal. I hadn’t done this in a while.

I use a javascript blocker in my web browser. After logging into the site, I was very surprised to see a call to Google Ad Manager.

This sparked my curiosity, so I decided to run the entire session through an intercepting proxy.

The intercepting proxy showed that Kaiser Permanente permits multiple ad trackers to collect data about people seeking health information from the Kaiser Permanente patient portal. To be clear, I was logged in to the portal – I was not browsing anonymously. The observed trackers specifically target logged in users.