Government health care website quietly sharing personal data
In a recent visit to the site, AP found that certain personal details - including age, income and smoking habits - were being passed along, likely without consumers' knowledge, to advertising and Web analytics sites.
Here are some of the
domains confirmed to be receiving your personal information:
Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are.
You have got to be kidding me! If you have filled out an application for ACA/Obamacare, all the information you input about you and your children has been shared, and shared, and shared, and shared.
It's how the business of information gathering/selling works. It is how advertisers find you. They pay the fishermen of your extremely personal data a lot of money to pin point people, you.
Did the government charge for our personal info? Or did they give it free of charge? Any members of Congress invested in any of these companies?
I find this reprehensible, a breach of trust, and probably about to be one of the biggest scandals of 2015. I hope I am wrong.
I'm sorry, this reassurance from the Obama administration just doesn't cut it for me:
There is no evidence that personal information has been misused. But connections to dozens of third-party tech firms were documented by technology experts who analyzed HealthCare.gov and then confirmed by AP. A handful of the companies were also collecting highly specific information. That combination is raising concerns.
Here's a link to another site reporting this. I include this link so that you can read the comments from other like-minded people.
Government health care website quietly sharing personal data
The scope of what is disclosed or how it might be used was not immediately clear, but it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer's Internet address, which can identify a person's name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.
EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation did the digging and found the domain sharing information in the AP story:
HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites
EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer header, which contains the URL of the page requesting a third party resource. The referrer header is an essential part of the HTTP protocol, and is sent for every request that is made on the web. The referrer header lets the requested resource know what URL the request came from. This would for example let a website know who else was linking to their pages. In this case however the referrer URL contains personal health information.
In some cases the information is also sent embedded in the request string itself, like so:
https://4037109.fls.doubleclick.net/...
type=20142003;cat=201420;ord=7917385912018;~oref=https://www.
healthcare.gov/see-plans/85601/results/?county=04019&age=40& smoker=1&parent=&pregnant=1&mec=&zip=85601&state=AZ&income=35000& &step=4?
^^ Not nice!
How do you feel about this revelation?
I am too upset to proofread. Apologies for any typos.
Off to Muckety Maps to check out who EFF is.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Defending Your Rights in the Digital World"
Here's the Muckety Map for EFF
Here's the link in case you want to dig deeper into who EFF is.
People related to Electronic Frontier Foundation:
John Perry Barlow - co-founder & director
Andrew Bridges - advisory board member
David J. Farber - director
Brewster Kahle - director
Mitchell Kapor - co-founder
Craig Newmark - advisory board member (founder Craigs List)
Rainey Reitman - activism director
Electronic Frontier Foundation past relationships:
Downey McGrath Group - lobby firm
Esther Dyson - chair
Paul Grewal - advisory board member
Steve Wozniak - founder
John Perry Barlow and Daniel Elsberg (a member of the Council of Foreign Relations CFR) also founded the
Freedom of the Press foundation,
John Perry Barlow - co-founder
Daniel Ellsberg - co-founder
John Cusack - director
Glenn Greenwald - director
Xeni Jardin - director
Laura Poitras - director
Rainey Reitman - director