Menlo Park, CA – A new investigation from the Financial Times revealed high traffic health websites are sharing personal user information with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other data companies. Breitbart reported on the investigation.
Apparently, popular websites such as WebMD are sharing the information.
Breitbart listed some of the user data being shared. The following list is quoted from Breitbart.
- drug names entered into Drugs.com were sent to Google’s ad unit DoubleClick.
- symptoms inputted into WebMD’s symptom checker, and diagnoses received, including “drug overdose”, were shared with Facebook.
- menstrual and ovulation cycle information from BabyCentre ended up with Amazon Marketing, among others.
- keywords such as “heart disease” and “considering abortion” were shared from sites like the British Heart Foundation, Bupa and Healthline to companies including Scorecard Research and Blue Kai (owned by software giant Oracle).
The marketing companies claim the data is not being combined with other consumer advertising data. It is not clear how the data is being used, though.
It is also unclear whether or not this is illegal. Depending on the type of data shared, it could be a violation of E.U. GDPR guidelines if personal data was shared without permission.
We doubt this type of data harvesting will stop anytime soon. Be careful what information you disclose online, folks!
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