If you have cancer, HIV, diabetes, lupus, depression, heart disease—or you simply look up health-related information online—advertisers are watching you. A new paper on what happens when users search for health information online shows that some of our most sensitive internet searches aren’t as anonymous as we might think.
Marketers care very much about what diseases and conditions people are searching for online. Tim Libert, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School For Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the paper says that over 90% of the 80,000 health-related pages he looked at on the Internet exposed user information to third parties. These pages included health information from commercial, nonprofit, educational, and government websites. According to Pew, 72 percent of internet users in the US look up health-related information.
Privacy Lacking At WebMD And CDC.gov
Site visit data by third parties isn’t just collected on for-profit sites like WebMD.com; even the Centers for Disease Control warns visitors that third-party content on their own pages includes marketing/analytics products like MotionPoint and Omniture that are used to generate targeted advertising. (Libert’s findings are published in this month’s Communications of the ACM.)
Although personal data is anonymized from these visits, they still lead to targeted advertisements showing up on user’s computers for health issues, as well as giving advertisers leads (which can be deciphered without too much trouble) that a user has certain health issues and what issues those are. And Google, which collects information from 78% of the pages Libert looked at, has disproportionate influence.
“The flip side of having so much power: If Google wants to make a serious and transparent commitment to protecting health data—going beyond the usual statements and demonstrating action—they can really move the entire industry,” Libert told Fast Company. “Also, I was really shocked to find data brokers like Experian involved. Here are the people who know every credit card balance you ever carried, and they also know your health interests? That’s pretty alarming.”
Into The Hands Of Data Brokers
Like so many other things on the Internet, the collection of data about individuals’ medical conditions is motivated by marketing.
To give one example, visits by interested parties to the CDC’s HIV/AIDS page sends browsing information to Google and AddThis, another tracking company, denoting that the user has an apparent interest in HIV and AIDS. Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter bookmarklets on the CDC’s page alert those three organizations about the visit as well.
