US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1. Break government 2. "See? Government never works!" 3. Profit 4. Repeat
Parasites.
Maybe it's always been the case, but it sure seems like it's just momentum and reflex at this point.
https://www.epi.org/blog/rider-in-the-house-homeland-securit...
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Edit: I acknowledge that you're just explaining a viewpoint and you don't necessarily hold it.
That it feels like there's an implicit assumption that they would (target or market) seems to be part of the problem.
It could also be conceived of as perfectly reasonable. One of the many (some very flawed) purposes of the ACA was to get more people insured, advertising that state-subsidized insurance is available for you is absolutely in that wheelhouse.
If retargeting is the problem, it should be banned across the board, both for public and private ad campaigns.
If you’re timely with prenatal care, marketers can predict a woman’s delivery data within a week with high confidence.
If someone targets black people, you're on that list; if someone targets white people, you're also on that list!
What is lying in this case?
Where is the official government backed race classification list? If you look at the options they don't even know what they mean by "race". There are options asking if you are hispanic, which my definition of the meaning takes the Spanish speaker form, what about french or german speakers why are they discriminated against? And surely when they list colors they can't be talking about people. I don't know what white race is, or black as I have never seen people of either of those colors, unless and except if they mean for hair color, shades of brown and peach maybe then okay. Then they add some regions and a couple countries, by why are so many left out if thats what they mean by race? I would really prefer they gave a proper taxonomy here, until that happens they can not say that whatever you entered is lying or wrong.
They still don't define Native in a context with any other definitions of "race". Just because people want to "cancel" others for identity labels it doesn't make a race, which is what I am asking for. A proper and complete taxonomy, until then they can not prove one was lying -- only out spend in lawyer fees to make it not worth fighting. Which is outside the point of: what is lying.
There are statics somewhere that had some 20%+ of people who are looked at as "white" in the US actually have recent African ancestors as well. The Irish and Italians had to fight to be called "white" in the US because in the US being "white" meant being at the top of the class hierarchy. Which is all the race thing is, class hierarchy, and why no one can actually define a taxonomy for it because it's based on the arbitrary.
I'm saying they can not prove one is lying because there is no way to be formally classified. I pointed out one of many low hanging fruit ways an argument can be made from the links the other posted included. Being a more creative type, and having money with time to spare, one could find a way to argue whatever race they wanted. Even people with stricter bounds for themself are likely to find a trail of DNA and/or lineage for many of the cherry-picked classes on those forms.(especially in North America)
The civil discussion should now be about the punishment for that.
Regulation is required for handling people's data
But I also don’t think it’s perfect because usually drug users know they are buying drugs whereas with tracking pixels it’s being done secretly.
The only things in a contract that can be enforced must be stated plainly and clearly
Turns out there are o ly a few conditions that are actually necessary
update: Yeah, my bad. The point of this comment was to express my increasing cynicism at how we just keep seeing this kind of corporate behavior over and over again and how even when a tiny win is achieved on things like data collection, right to repair, ease for cancelling subscriptions, privacy, and so on and so on, they are so quickly over taken by new tactics or clawbacks/loopholes/non-enforcement of those laws. HN comments was probably the wrong place to vent and its too late to delete it.
We need to overturn CU if we want to be able to go back to a world where government serves people rather than multinational conglomerates.
It ruled that the federal government was wrong to restrict the speech rights of some groups while allowing other very similar groups to still retain their rights. One of the major examples of this was the media industry. A for-profit newspaper company could spend whatever amount of money it wanted to on political speech. An identical company in a different field could not. This, the court ruled, was unconstitutional.
It also did not grant corporations personhood, the other thing people like to state that it did.
Or we could stop looking at SCOTUS to fix legislation and ask the branch of government who's job it is to fix legislation, Congress.
In practice most of the foxes that promise to do so never actually will.
What's your proposal to solve this?
To me, money in politics is the red herring to keep you from looking at the real election reform that needs to happen, some combination of open primaries (to remove the effect of primaries going to more extreme candidates rather than centrists) and an alternative to first past the post elections to allow people to vote for who they like without worrying about throwing away their votes (there are many different systems to do this, they're all major improvements).
The money in politics is used by the parties to back their preferred candidates and the voters go along with it in the general elections because they don't want to waste their votes. The money helps them do the bad thing but it isn't the bad thing.
And also about the targeting of swing districts.
I think you mean "manipulating content algorithms to favor their viewpoints and to target individuals for maximum effect."
Crypto rug-pulls are now done by a sitting president and if you complain you simply have a "victim mentality" because you're not looking for a way to exploit your neighbor.
We should really be embarrassed of our selves yet people come on here every day to defend the scammers.
Isn't there supposed to be a vast and powerful federal government with incredible investigatory and arrest powers? The one that people are taught to rely on since they stand no chance against a trillion dollar monopoly?
I've seen unfathomable abuses in HIPAA privacy laws. Some of it is was for my own health records. If you only knew how bad it was. I can't detail it all because their lawyers will bully and intimidate me like they already have.
HIPAA was a way to provide surveillance of your health. Corporations, governments, law enforcement, healthcare professionals, or even a petulant child that annoys a parent who's a doctor has access to everyone's health records. The public sentiment on HIPAA laws is just so backwards.
...why?
> State officials say they embed this technology on the exchanges to measure marketing campaigns and to advertise to people who visit their sites
What an absurdist reality we live in
> Tara Lee, a spokesperson for the Washington state exchange, said the tracker on the site was used for advertising campaigns, adding that email, phone and country identifiers were shared with TikTok.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-healthcare-advertisi...
Personally, I feel local government should not be engaging these services in this way. I don't feel that it's a wise use and that our government employees should be more protective of the public who use their services.
The same reason that I put Google Analytics on my blog in 2014. They want to know how many people are using their site and how.
And like me, they didn't think about the fact that these analytics services are run by advertising companies that may use the data for other purposes. Unlike me, they have privacy laws to follow because they work with health data.
Yeah, why?
Thank you for a googleable term.
Are there any guides on how to decide which "race" you are? Because I cannot imagine that everyone knows exactly which part of the earth all of their ancestors originate from.
Practically speaking, most Americans over the past 300 years knew of specific near ancestors who came from somewhere else (with little interbreeding among immigrant populations) and answered based on that. The obvious exceptions were descendants of slaves and Native Americans, which is why those were the first non-white (where 'white' includes all Europeans as well as large parts of the Middle East and North Africa) categories tracked by the census.
For example, my labs include at least two that have different specified thresholds for "African-American" or "non-AA" patients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease#United_Sta...
This is fundamentally different by intent than in Europe (using french here) where we refer to 'la race humaine' which is the _species_.
The nuance is critical during debates. While I was discussing racial differences to some Swiss folks, they thought I was talking Nazi propaganda! We are all part of the human species, the human species has many races. We are all equal!
Are those slashes AND or OR?
well, I mean, listen, if it's part of the census, that's... still government-level racial discrimination. It might not be a duck, but this thing has a certain duck-shaped silhuette.
Or if that tracking is considered legal in this particular case - WHY?
Okay. That's not much of a signal, is it? This is "metadata" level of detail.
It's just by default nobody really wants to give up disk space so you can do better ad tracking so the banner is necessary to convince them to.
Also, I believe (but am not certain) that if there was any criminal case, it would be leadership (C*O) not individual software engineers who would be charged. This is speculation on my part, if anybody has clear facts I'm happy to hear them.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
You have to explicitly grant permission for your data to be sold. What's very likely is that either the healthcare provider or insurance company included a request for authorization to sell that data, and the authorization was signed without paying much attention to it.
Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.
Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.
(I work in healthcare-adjacent and have met with many lawyers and had to explain them all about "HIPAA compliance"; my comment was not made from ignorance, but practical experience based on learning about how the law is used. There is a privacy rule in it, but that was not the real intent of the law. The intent was to make it easy to keep your health care when you moved between jobs.)
I highlighted SirFatty's text, looked up on google and first result show it near verbatim on cdc.gov.
https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/php/resources/health-insurance-port...
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage in the group and individual markets, to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, to promote the use of medical savings accounts, to improve access to long-term care services and coverage, to simplify the administration of health insurance, and for other purposes.
2 relevant attributes as it turns out.
Why those questions, but no Danish vs non Danish, and so on?
2. even if they could, it would be pretty illegal, I think/hope, to then be like "Oh, well your sickle cell anemia is going to be paid for differently, because everyone knows black people statistically have more of that.
Why?