US healthcare market shares citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

Nearly all of America’s 20 state-run health insurance marketplaces shared their residents’ application information with advertising and technology giants like Google, LinkedIn, Meta and Snap, according to a new Bloomberg study.

The report highlights privacy concerns posed by pixel-sized trackers that allow website owners to collect information about visitors for web analytics and bug identification. A common tool in digital advertising, these trackers can also collect personal information if misconfigured and placed on websites that contain sensitive content, such as medical data.

According to Bloomberg, the New York State Health Insurance Exchange shared information about individuals’ applications with multiple technology companies, including whether they provided details on whether a family member was incarcerated.

The Washington, D.C., health insurance exchange also asked residents about a person’s gender and race, but TikTok’s pixel tracker tried to edit that. Some races wore masks, others did not, the magazine reported. A spokesperson for the Washington DC Exchange told Bloomberg that residents’ email addresses, phone numbers and country identification information were also shared with TikTok.

Washington, D.C., paused its rollout of a TikTok tracker, and the state of Virginia removed a meta tracker from its website after Bloomberg discovered it was sharing residents’ ZIP codes with the tech giant.

This is not a new problem, and has been an issue for telemedicine startups and healthcare giants alike before. Several companies and medical giants have had to notify millions of people that their health information was inadvertently collected and shared with big technology companies that profit from using consumer data for advertising.

But a Bloomberg study shows that when these pixel trackers are placed on government websites, they can affect wide swaths of the population. The publication noted that more than 7 million Americans purchased health insurance this year through state health insurance exchanges.