US healthcare markets shared citizenship and brand identities with marketing technology giants

Nearly all 20 U.S. government-regulated insurance marketplaces have shared user data with advertisers and social media platforms, including Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and Snap, according to a new Bloomberg survey.

The report brings up the privacy issues created by pixel trackerswhich allows website owners to collect information about their visitors, often for web analytics and bug detection. A popular tool in digital marketing, these trackers also allow the collection of personal information if it is incorrectly edited and posted on websites with sensitive content, such as medical information.

Per Bloomberg, the New York-based health insurance exchange shared information with several tech companies about a person’s employment, including whether they provided information about whether they had married family members.

The health insurance exchange in Washington, DC also asked residents about the person’s gender and race, which the TikTok pixel tracker tried to change. Some species were covered while others were not, the book said. A spokesperson for the Washington, DC exchange told Bloomberg that citizens’ email addresses, phone numbers, and national identifiers were also shared by TikTok.

Washington, DC suspended the release of the TikTok tracker, and Virginia removed the Meta tracker from its website after Bloomberg discovered it was sharing citizens’ zip codes with the tech giant.

This is not a new problem, and it has been known before basics of telehealth and medical giants alike. Several companies and healthcare giants have had to inform millions of people that they unknowingly collected and shared their health information with tech giants, whose profits come from using consumer data for marketing.

But Bloomberg research shows that these pixel trackers can affect traffic when placed on government websites. The publication reported that more than 7 million Americans bought health insurance this year through the health insurance exchanges.