Requests for two class action lawsuits were recently filed against Meta, claiming that the web giant collects confidential and sensitive medical information from surfers without their knowledge.
The lawsuits, which were filed in California in June and July and are also directed against major medical institutions in the US, claim that Meta Pixel, an analytical tool that targets and collects information about surfers in order to tailor advertising content to them, was embedded in hundreds of medical and health websites in the US.
"Use sensitive medical information": Meta company, photo: Reuters
Some of these medical sites are regional affiliates of Dignity Health - a network of portals that provide patients with information about their medical records, doctor visit summaries, lab test results and more.
It is also claimed that Meta Pixel is installed on the websites of 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the US, and that the tool extracts medical statuses of patients from these websites for marketing purposes. One of the examples given is that of a woman, whose identity has not been revealed, who started seeing ads related to treatment on Facebook With heart and knee problems - after browsing a medical portal.
Meta does require the sites to inform the surfers that their actions on the sites are recorded for the purposes of collecting marketing information and adapting ads (just as many sites ask us to agree to the collection of cookies), but in the lawsuit requests it is stated that the company did not enforce this requirement on the aforementioned sites. Furthermore, it was clarified that in a moral failure, since Meta knew that these were sites that transmit personal, sensitive and supposedly secure information, and therefore Pixel should not have been installed on them in the first place. Therefore, if the applications for the class actions are accepted, the plaintiffs will demand compensation on behalf of millions of Americans who surfed the various medical websites and their basic right to medical confidentiality The offenses attributed to Meta and the defendant institutions are breach of contract, invasion of privacy, violation of federal laws dealing with electronic communications, and more.
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