Lawyers Send Mobile Ads To Phones In ER Waiting Rooms
npr.org
npr.org
Of course, this made no sense to me, as I deny sharing of my medical information with anyone. So I contacted the office, went through a couple of phone trees and spoke with a few different people. None of them could see the issue with what happened. Then I explained a phone number is PII, and tying it to a medication seemed like a significant HIPPA issue.
Then things changed, it took a few hours to hear the whole story where a pharmaceutical rep had apparently told the nurses/office staff about this great way to get prescription drug information to patents by simply entering the medication and the patient's phone number in an App...
I’ve been told this is rectified, but the reality is I wish there was more I could do. I can’t imagine how many patients have been affected by this and thought nothing of it.
But, I do think that's where we're headed fast: with so many interconnections, "affiliate" side-deals, opt-out limitations, etc., we'll soon not be able to manage the byzantine trail of entities that have access to our data in a given scenario. Our efforts to even understand who has our data and how, let alone control access, will be near-useless.
2. They’re called device ids not phone ids. Proof right there the author didn’t research effectively.
3. The doctors/etc who have to abide by hiipa are explicitly requires to have their vendors (ex marketers) follow the same laws as them. This goes for any industry, but is written in the law for health.
Geofences are awesome for things like sports arenas, neighborhoods, malls, etc. but ineffective for anything smaller.
Edit: For #1 here are two sources. This is coming from a vendor that only sells location data, so their accuracy number of 93 feet is definitely not 100% truthful.
https://www.placeiq.com/2016/05/study-smartphone-location-on...
https://www.placeiq.com/2016/10/location-data-accuracy-the-f...
It's going to be tremendously effective in rural areas; the hospital closest to my parents' is the only thing within several hundred meters.
Is there a competing alternative that does any better? I wouldn't count on shady would-be advertisers to wait for perfect targeting solutions, if I were you (or else there'd be basically no advertising anywhere!).
A 10-50% chance of successfully getting an ad in front of an active patient is tremendously higher than any other advertising method available to them, I'd suspect.
Edit: found it https://i.imgur.com/QMXcYqn.png
It's the same as any type of advertising. As long as they produce more than they cost, it's a no brainer.
In an urban setting, sure, but most hospitals I've been to are MASSIVE, sprawling facilities.
Seems like the parking lot is close enough to being in the ER anyway.
Regardless, the 'waste' will be more from targeting health care workers, janitors, visitors, etc, but the targeting will still be more effective than not doing it at all.
You will most likely get everyone who’s phone was within the overall geofence +100yards or so (sometimes better sometimes worse, really depends on what and how you are measuring).
That will include everyone above and below you with good enough signal to get through. Hospitals are usually tall in urban centers, so 5-10 stories of people?
Now you have your potential list. However, the real segment you just made are hospital visitors + employees/vendors.
Maybe you can exclude those that you see a lot or on a regular cycle as staff/vendors.
You are still not very close to just “personal injury” data.
Usually, you’ll need to combine this with something more to make better segment overall and go from there.
Unfortunately, data vendors will often market the above without much cleaning as “ER visitors” or “people with health problem X”.
There are numerous threads on HN about how bad some of these segments are - people tagged with mutually exclusive segments, wrong info, etc. That’s why FB and Google, and to a lesser extent for now Amazon, are sitting on some really valuable data - we tend to tell them explicitly and/or they have fine-grained location on us.
And let’s not forget that stuff like this has spurred responses like GDPR.
(I'm equal parts horrified and impressed that someone's actually doing this... This is why, as much as it's annoying at work, I really like the GDPR...)
I’d consider using something like this if I had already deployed marketing capital elsewhere and hit diminishing returns. These are more akin to gambling in my book.
Not to say that polygon-based geofencing doesn’t work. It does, but with larger, less dense locations where the lower fidelity is good enough.
I'm not so sure in this specific case. If I were a (cue pejorative stereotype for emphasis) scumbag ambulance chasing lawyer - I doubt there's anything in Facebook or Google's ad targeting demographics that'd give me quite the same opportunities as a rough-and-ready demographic of "people at or close to hospital emergency departments" to try selling to...
I hope (but am prepared to be shown otherwise) than neither Facebook nor Google have an easy way to target ads to people who've just posted "Faaark! Just been in a car accident! #YOLO #GladIBoughtAVolvo #ShouldntHaveBeenTexting"
(Evil-idea: I wonder if anyone's using siome combinations of accelerometer and GPS data to detect potentially traumatic events and selling that data on?)
This is somewhat true of my local hospital, but the ER facility is dwarfed by the number of non-ER facilities in a 100-200 yard radius. I personally see two specialists in the facility, receive diagnostic imaging and bloodwork, plus physical therapy within that same area. I additionally drive every day through that radius as I live on the same street as my hospital.
I dont want or need these sorts of ads cropping up.
The large local hospital in Redmond WA (Evergreen) is right next to a strip mall and shares a parking lot with a movie theater.
Not. NPR is the mainest of mainstream news and radio-originated to boot, so their reporting is commonly simplified to an extreme degree for easy comprehension by a general audience who may well be engaged in other tasks like driving.
Sure, but advertising is a total crap shoot anyways. How well do you think those billboards on the highway are targeted? Anything that ups your chances of getting in front of your target audience is a huge win. This is Facebook's entire business model.
If built correctly I can target exactly who I want to with minimal effort. Takes some time to prune and optimize to get it there though.
That's amazingly accurate, this is not for navigation purposes within the hospital but for advertising on the hospital grounds (typically a substantial multiple of 100 yards). It's not like you want to direct someone to a certain wing, though it is probably even accurate enough for that .
Besides, for many phones it is much closer than that, because location services are enabled for instance for Google (because someone used Google maps) or because some app has linked an SDK that lifts the location data from the phone and moves it to some server.
Are you concerned that it may not be the right thing to do even if it is technically legal? I am guessing you work in adtech, I am wondering if you or your workplace has a model to address those kinds of questions?
*I’m not advocating for this usage just illustrating a point
We need regulation that targets specific problems, nothing more and nothing less. Instead we get regulation that may loosely address the problem it was originally drafted to address, but has since grown into a mess of compromises added at the request of lawyers, lobbyists, and uninformed politicians.
I'll start:
"You cannot send advertising to people when you suspect (e.g. by geofence) they are suffering from a medical emergency."
Doesn't this risk making things worse? If you advertising based on a metric that could lead to that conclusion (even if it isn't your intent), you might feel obligated to geolocate people to avoid being accused of breaching it. The loose wording could also lead to companies trying to exploit loopholes - "we weren't advertising to people suffering a medical emergency, most of whom _aren't_ suffering a medical emergency. We had no reason to suspect _they_ were suffering a medical emergency.". You either need to be stricter (no advertising specifically targeted at hospitals) or specify precisely what it means to "suspect".
> Personal data held by a hospital about their patients may not be used for any non-medical purpose, and may not be shared with any third parties unless directly necessary for a medical purpose.
It's weird that targeted advertising is so widely criticized now, but when it was made popular by Google a couple of decades ago (we'll read your email and offer you things that you'll like!), it was hailed as an improvement over the blanket ads that were polluting the internet and of no use to just about anybody. I still think targeted ads are fantastic. Advertisers are doing the leg-work of informing people about how to buy what they want, instead of just cars, shoes, and travel which is what we used to see.
They then run it through a lot of ad networks.
Have used IP Targeting to target conferences/events and several hotels around the conference and it worked really well.
While it will be good for known IP ranges to be used for targeting, it should be an additional tactic, not the only one. Geo-targeted ad-buys within an area where there may be higher concentration of hospitals, layered on with additional targeting parameters, will be the optimal setup.
Also, I imagine that televangelists who want a shiny new airplane probably target low-income neighborhoods with their free enchanted water 'guaranteed to bring wealth and prosperity'.
Could be both, could be some website you viewed, could be google maps, anything that shares your location. Location data is pretty valuable to advertisers, OpenRTB supports it explicitly during the real time bidding process.
All manner of cleaning is applied to the data to ensure that it isn't faked or useless before the bidding starts.
In quite a few hospitals that I've been to mobile phones are forbidden in the ER, why is it different with these hospitals?
[1]: https://health.stackexchange.com/questions/10880/are-cell-ph...
surprised and disappointed HN comments are about tech...
As opposed to a hearse chasing leach?
At least they won't need fast cars.
Or the young parents who want to add their new kid to their will? Or the very ill person who realizes that their will/life insurance leaves everything to their ex-wife, not their current family? Getting that changed asap will certainly be a relief to them. Or the parents who's kid was just brought to the hospital by the cops and need someone to talk to about it?
There are times and places where lawyers do good things, they just aren't as sexy as the evil things.