How Covered California sent patient’s personal health data to LinkedIn

By Tomas Apodaca and Colin Lecher CalMatters The website that lets Californians shop for wellbeing insurance under the Affordable Care Act coveredca com has been sending sensitive input to LinkedIn forensic testing by CalMatters has revealed As visitors filled out forms on the website trackers on the same pages informed LinkedIn their answers to questions about whether they were blind pregnant or used a high number of prescription medications The trackers also monitored whether the visitors mentioned they were transgender or achievable casualties of domestic abuse See the records on our Github repo Related Articles DOGE cuts hit SJSU UC Berkeley UCSF Researcher says I don t know that they understood what I was doing El Camino Wellness breaks ground on rehab hospital in Sunnyvale Cancer Advocacy Locality s Lafayette expansion reflects a different approach to recovery care How changes to Regional Therapeutic Center s trauma care heavily impacted vitality services in Santa Clara County Stanford assessment When measles could return if vaccination rates continue to fall Covered California the organization that operates the website removed the trackers as CalMatters and The Markup informed this article The organization revealed they were removed due to a marketing agency transition in early April In a declaration Kelly Donohue a spokesperson for the agency established that records was sent to LinkedIn as part of an advertising campaign Since being informed of the tracking all ongoing advertising-related tags across our website have been turned off out of an abundance of caution she added Covered California has initiated a review of our websites and information assurance and privacy protocols to ensure that no analytics tools are impermissibly sharing sensitive consumer information Donohue stated adding that they would share additional findings as they become available taking any necessary efforts to safeguard the assurance and privacy of consumer details When an individual indicated they were pregnant the information was sent to LinkedIn via the Insight Tag Visitors who filled out fitness information on the site may have had their facts tracked for more than a year according to Donohue who reported the LinkedIn campaign began in February CalMatters observed the trackers directly in February and March of this year It established majority of ad trackers including the Meta pixel tracker as well as all third-party cookies have been removed from the site as of April Since more than million Americans have signed up for physical condition insurance through state exchanges like Covered California They were set up under the Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Barack Obama years ago States can either operate their exchange websites in partnership with the federal leadership or independently as California does Covered California operates as an independent entity within the state executive Its board is appointed by the governor and Legislature In March Covered California revealed that after four years of increasing enrollment a record of nearly million people were covered by vitality insurance through the effort In all the organization declared about one in six Californians were at one point enrolled through Covered California Between and the uninsured rate fell from to according to the organization the largest drop of any state during that time period This coincided with a series of eligibility expansions to Medi-Cal the state s wellness insurance plan for lower-income households Experts expressed alarm at the idea that those millions of people could have had sensitive medical material sent to a private company without their knowledge or consent Sara Geoghegan senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center revealed it was concerning and invasive for a strength insurance website to be sending facts that was wholly irrelevant to the uses of a for-profit company like LinkedIn It s unfortunate she announced because people don t expect that their vitality information will be collected and used in this way The LinkedIn Insight Tag CalMatters and The Markup in latest months scanned for trackers on hundreds of California state and county leadership websites that offer services for undocumented immigrants using Blacklight an automated tool developed by The Markup for auditing website trackers CalMatters uncovered that Covered California had more than trackers on its site Out of more than of the authorities sites the average number of trackers on the sites was three Covered California had dozens more than any other website we examined On coveredca com trackers from well-known social media firms like Meta collected information on visitor page views while lesser-known analytics and media campaign companies like email marketing company LiveIntent also followed users across the site But by far the largest part sensitive information was transmitted to LinkedIn While various of the records sent to LinkedIn was relatively innocuous such as what pages were visited Covered California also sent the company detailed information when visitors selected doctors to see if they were covered by a plan including their specialization The site also advised LinkedIn if someone searched for a specific hospital When an individual selected a anatomical provider the information was sent to LinkedIn via the Insight Tag In addition to demographic information including gender the site also shared details with LinkedIn when visitors selected their ethnicity and marital status and when they stated coveredca com how often they saw doctors for surgery or outpatient medication When an individual selected their ethnicity the information was sent to LinkedIn via the Insight Tag LinkedIn like other large social media firms offers a way for websites to easily transmit information on their visitors through a tracking tool that the sites can place on their pages In LinkedIn s matter this tool is called the Insight Tag By using the tag businesses and other organizations can later target advertisements on LinkedIn to consumers that have already shown interest in their products or services For an e-commerce site a tracker on a page might be able to note when someone added a product to their cart and the business can then send ads for that product to the same person on their social media feeds A physical condition care marketplace like Covered California might use the trackers to reach a group of people who might be interested in a reminder of a deadline for open wellbeing insurance enrollment for example In its declaration Covered California noted the usefulness of these tools saying the organization leverages LinkedIn s advertising platform tools to understand consumer behavior and deliver tailored messages to help them make informed decisions about their physical condition care options When an individual indicated they were a victim of domestic abuse or spousal abandonment the information was sent to LinkedIn via the Insight Tag Trackers can also be valuable to the social media companies that offer them In addition to driving ad sales they provide an opportunity to gather information on visitors to websites other than their own On its informational page about the Insight Tag LinkedIn places the burden on websites that employ the tag not to use it in risky situations The tag should not be installed on web pages that collect or contain Sensitive Details the page advises including pages offering specific health-related or financial services or products to consumers LinkedIn spokesperson Brionna Ruff commented in an emailed comment Our Ads Agreement and documentation expressly prohibit customers from installing the Insight Tag on web pages that collect or contain sensitive material including pages offering health-related services We don t allow advertisers to target ads based on sensitive records or categories Legal recourse Collection of sensitive information by social media trackers has in previous instances led to removal of the trackers lawsuits and scrutiny by state and federal lawmakers For example after The Markup in revealed the Department of Mentoring sent personal information to Facebook when students applied for college financial aid online the department turned off the sharing faced questions from two members of Congress and was sued by two advocacy groups who sought more information about the sharing Other stories in the same series about trackers known as the Pixel Hunt also led to changes and blowback including a crackdown by the Federal Transaction Commission on telehealth companies transmitting personal information to companies including Meta and Google without user consent and proposed class action lawsuits over information shared through trackers with drug stores wellbeing providers and tax prep companies LinkedIn is already facing multiple proposed class-action lawsuits related to the collection of physiological information In October three new lawsuits in California courts alleged that LinkedIn violated users privacy by collecting information on physiological appointment sites including for a fertility clinic Social media companies tracking practices have underpinned the tremendous improvement of the tech industry but limited web users are aware of how far the tracking goes This absolutely contradicts the expectation of the average consumer Geoghegan disclosed In California a law called the California Confidentiality of Therapeutic Information Act governs the privacy of health information in the state Under the act consumers must give permission to chosen organizations before their therapeutic information is disclosed to third parties Companies have faced litigation under the law for using web tracking technologies although those suits have not constantly been flourishing Geoghegan announced current protections like these don t go far enough in helping consumers protect their sensitive figures This is an exact example of why we need better protections she announced of LinkedIn receiving the statistics This is sensitive vitality information that consumers expect to be protected and a lack of regulations is failing us