The Atlantic [free to read]: “..We leave digital traces about our health everywhere we go: by completing forms like BetterHelp’s. By requesting a prescription refill online. By clicking on a link. By asking a search engine about dosages or directions to a clinic or pain in chest dying???? By shopping, online or off. By participating in consumer genetic testing. By stepping on a smart scale or using a smart thermometer. By joining a Facebook group or a Discord server for people with a certain medical condition. By using internet-connected exercise equipment. By using an app or a service to count your steps or track your menstrual cycle or log your workouts. Even demographic and financial data unrelated to health can be aggregated and analyzed to reveal or infer sensitive information about people’s physical or mental-health conditions. All of this information is valuable to advertisers and to the tech companies that sell ad space and targeting to them. It’s valuable precisely because it’s intimate: More than perhaps anything else, our health guides our behavior. And the more these companies know, the easier they can influence us. Over the past year or so, reporting has found evidence of a Meta tracking tool collecting patient information from hospital websites, and apps from Drugs.com and WebMD sharing search terms such as herpes and depression, plus identifying information about users, with advertisers. (Meta has denied receiving and using data from the tool, and Drugs.com has said that it was not sharing data that qualified as “sensitive personal information.”) In 2021, the FTC settled with the period and ovulation app Flo, which has reported having more than 100 million users, after alleging that it had disclosed information about users’ reproductive health with third-party marketing and analytics services, even though its privacy policies explicitly said that it wouldn’t do so. (Flo, like BetterHelp, said that its agreement with the FTC wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing and that it didn’t share users’ names, addresses, or birthdays.)”