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Daily Archives: June 16, 2022

Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites

“Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information By Todd Feathers, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Surya Mattu – A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook. The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook…”

Warren, Wyden, Murray, Whitehouse, Sanders Introduce Legislation to Ban Data Brokers from Selling Americans’ Location and Health Data

Bill Text (PDF) | One-Pager (PDF) – “United States Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced the Health and Location Data Protection Act, legislation that bans data brokers from selling some of the most sensitive data available about everyday Americans: their health and location data. The legislation is cosponsored by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Chair of the… Continue Reading

What the TSA could teach Congress about gun control

Recode – “TSA PreCheck uses enhanced background checks to make everyone safer. With the country continually in mourning over gun violence — we keep seeing mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting — it’s time to find ways to prevent it, lest we remain the “only nation where this regularly happens.” Those solutions needn’t be… Continue Reading

Private Data/Public Regulation

Friedman, Barry, Private Data/Public Regulation (May 13, 2022). NSTL 2105 Hoover (2021), NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4117794 “This article argues that, as a matter of constitutional law, government agencies that engage in policing cannot collect digital data, particularly about individuals for whom there is no suspicion of… Continue Reading

How strong is your Covid immunity?

NBC News: “A newly developed blood test that measures a specific immune response in the body could help doctors gauge how much protection a person has against Covid-19, according to a new study. The test, which focuses on the part of the immune system that confers long-term protection by prompting the body to “remember” the virus,… Continue Reading