Name: How medical websites share your data | FT
Uploaded: 2020-03-21T04:31:07.000Z
Duration: 6 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every day, thousands of people look at health websites to find out information about their health or put in their symptoms to figure out if they can get a diagnosis.

Adverbs of degree

So we decided to look behind the scenes on Look at really what happens to the data that we put into held websites.

So Max here is gonna take us through one specific website that we decided to analyze and show us really what's going on.

The hidden tracking that happens behind the scenes.

We're gonna be going to the Web MD symptoms checker.

What might not be clear when we're opening up a Web page is there's a lot of stuff that's happening behind the scenes, though normally this is hidden to us.

Of course, little here called it should be.

So here, really, we should be able to see a list of companies or trackers that are looking at what we're doing on this website, right?

Well, we're interested in the third parties domain names, websites owned by other companies, potentially that are being communicated with by this page.

This is the request that our computer made when we went to this.

You're well when we press center on down here.

We've got this bit of information, says Set Cookie.

And then we've got a long string of numbers and letters.

This page is made, which is also included this specific I D.

So this is just communicating with another website normally fetching a bit of information.

So fetching a whole Web page or fetching an image or fetching a script, a bit of code that's going going to be used on the page and the thing that's interesting here is this is even before we've clicked, I agree to their privacy policy, right?

So at this point, we haven't agreed to being tracked.

So these companies that are getting the I d.

What does it mean that what can they do with that?

Well, they can associate that I d with this Web address, but also we're about to start entering some personal information on dhe.

If there were further request sending that information to them, I'll have a personal identify on.

Then they also have some protected category data about us.

OK, so shall we go in and try and put in some medical symptoms and see who ends up getting a peek of thumb waken remind of fema now.

Okay, So back on this list, if I click care, we can see what happened when I pressed that mail button.

So as soon as we clicked mail that information went to Facebook on a bunch of other people.

So if I search for diarrhea, we can see another very similar requests.

So it's We've clicked a common symptom button.

One of these buttons down here on the bottom.

Most likely we thought ulcerative colitis for the flu, or we've got taken a drug overdose.

So Facebook has received all of the bottoms that we've collect, including our symptoms, even our diagnosis on dhe We I don't know what they're doing with that.

Um, but I think it's really interesting because, you know, ultimately, they're an advertising company.

So if they're using this to build profiles about us associated with one of the ID's, then it just means that people can target us.

Or rather, other advertising companies can target us based on what they think we have.

Yes, this is a wall personal health information.

The information is meant to be some of the most protected by law on dhe.

Certainly something you don't want Facebook to know about.

So let's have a look at some of the third parties now.

I was expecting this toe A ll be the big tech companies.

There are many other companies which really aren't household names.

They're quite a big attack company as a long day.

And you would never realize from going to this quite simple page with two adverts.

Just how many companies would be receiving data on dhe?

What's interesting right is that we don't know what happens after this bloke so they could be selling on this information or sharing it with a whole bunch of other companies who then sell it on and on and on.

So, you know, we have no idea, really whose hands that ends up in, and we have no choice but to trust him.

So what I think is interesting, as a lot of that happened before we clicked.

There was a link to the privacy policy that every time you place any of these tracking cookies onto a website, you have to ask the user whether they consent to that.

So when I went through the policy kind of says that they share data with third parties, they list third parties.

So what they said is we share some data with Google and Facebook.

If you want to know what they do with it, look at their privacy policies.

And, you know, that's very much gray area.

Because, according to the law, consent is supposed to be on ambiguous Andi.

I wouldn't say that was unambiguous at all because I'm still left with a 1,000,000 questions about where my data is going, and what's happening with it is that protected category data.

DeMint to require explicit consent that this didn't seem to be particularly special.

 Did you know we would never dream that this data was being shared in the way that it was in the privacy policy really doesn't give us an idea of the extent of this, does. 