Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information By: Todd Feathers, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Surya Mattu A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to…
Category: Business
Senate bill would ban data brokers from selling location and health data
Jon Brodkin reports: A bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would prohibit data brokers from selling Americans’ location and health data, Warren’s office said Wednesday. “Largely unregulated by federal law, data brokers gather intensely personal data such as location data from seemingly innocuous sources including weather apps and prayer apps—oftentimes without the consumer’s consent or…
Firefox: Our new cookie protection will stop companies tracking you across sites
Liam Tung reports: Mozilla has rolled out a privacy protection it calls “Total Cookie Protection” as the default for the browser on Windows, Mac and Linux. The idea behind Total Cookie Protection is that cookies remain limited to the site from which they were added to a browser. Mozilla’s analogy for the functionality of Total…
You agreed to what? Doctor check-in software harvests your health data
Gregory Fowler reports: […] Several Washington Post readers recently wrote to Ask Help Desk about a consent form they were asked to sign while checking in for a doctor’s appointment. Most of us just hurriedly fill out whatever paperwork is put in front of us, but these eagle-eyed readers paused at this: “I hereby authorize…