Several hospitals are also accused of having participated in this collection aimed at improving the relevance of targeted advertising on the social network.
It is not yet today that Meta will restore its image, which has been somewhat tarnished by numerous scandals around its use of personal data…
Meta once again singled out for its personal data practices
Mark Zuckerberg’s group is the subject of a complaint filed with the Californian courts. The company is not the only one targeted by this lawsuit since several American hospitals, including the UCSF Medical Center and the Dignity Health Medical Foundation are also cited.
The plaintiffs accuse Meta of having violated medical data privacy laws by collecting health information, which was later used by the social network Facebook to improve the relevance of advertisements offered to patients.
In question, the Meta Pixel tool, adopted by many websites to analyze advertisements published on both Facebook and Instagram.
Health information would have been used to offer targeted ads based on patient pathologies
According to a survey carried out by the media The Markup last June, 33 of the top 100 US hospitals are integrating Meta Pixel into their websites. Worse still, for seven of them the tool is used on patient portals, confidential areas accessible only with a username and password.
Meta Pixel would thus collect information on the state of health of patients, their past and future appointments with practitioners and their allergies to certain drugs. With this data, Facebook would be able to learn a lot about the pathologies of some of its users.
This is what a patient, cited in the complaint, says, who was surprised to see advertisements dealing with solutions related to her heart and knee problems.
A second complaint filed in parallel attests that 664 health organizations were able to send medical data to Facebook via Meta Pixel.
The Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prohibits the sharing of health data without patient consent.
If this class action suit is successful, Meta will have to prove that it did not act deliberately in order to avoid costly damages.
Source : The Verge
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