A bill introduced Thursday in response to the reversal of Roe v. Wade would enshrine first-of-its kind protections for location data and health information. If it passes, it has the potential to be one of the most significant privacy laws in American history.
The Federal Trade Commission is poised to ban the mental health app BetterHelp from sharing medical information with Facebook, Snapchat, and other online advertisers. A proposed order issued Thursday includes a $7.8 million fine and limits the ways BetterHelp can share mental health data going forward. It’s part of a…
Looking for lists of people with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, or OCD? No problem. There are lots of companies who would love to sell it to you. They can even include names, emails, home addresses, income, ethnicity, and details about people’s children. It’s cheap too, with minimum purchases of just…
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the 886-bed hospital where I was born in Los Angeles, has a privacy problem. If you head to the Cedars website today you’ll be greeted by six ad trackers and 17 third-party cookies—according to the Markup’s Backlight tool—and, apparently, that’s an improvement.
Want to save money on drugs? You could head to GoodRx.com. Type in the name of a medication, and the company will give you a coupon to use at a pharmacy. But there’s a little problem, one that GoodRx forgot to tell its customers about. Going back to at least 2017, GoodRx sent details about the medications you take to…
The Federal Trade Commission took historic action against the medication discount service GoodRx Wednesday, issuing a $1.5 million fine against the company for sharing data about users’ prescriptions with Facebook, Google, and others. It’s a move that could usher in a new era of health privacy in the United States.
