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The Markup said there did not appear to be any business associate agreements between the hospitals and Meta that would allow the data sharing under the HIPAA Rules, and express consent from patients authorizing the sharing of data with Meta did not appear to have been obtained, suggesting potential HIPAA violations. Participation in that project involved allowing data to be sent to The Markup about the sites they visited, which revealed the data being sent to Meta included patients’ medications, descriptions of their allergic reactions, and details about their upcoming doctor’s appointments. The researchers found that five of those hospital systems were sending data to Meta about real patients who volunteered to participate in the Pixel Hunt project, which was jointly run by the Markup and Mozilla Rally. It was a similar story with several other websites, which sent information taken from the selection made from dropdown menus, which provided information about the patient’s condition – Alzheimer’s disease for example.Įven more concerning is that for 7 hospital systems, Meta Pixel was installed inside password-protected patient portals. In one example – University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center – the researchers found that when a visitor clicks on the ‘Schedule Online’ button on a doctor’s page, Meta Pixel sent the text of the button to Meta, along with the doctor’s name and the search term, which for that patient was pregnancy termination. The Markup found that Meta Pixel tracking was present on a third of hospitals’ appointment scheduling pages. The analysis was conducted by The Markup and the report was co-published by STAT. On a hospital website, the tracker could collect a user’s IP address and link it to sensitive information, such as if that individual had clicked to make an appointment. That information is then automatically sent to Facebook. Meta Pixel can collect a variety of data, including information about the buttons clicked and the pages visited by clicking those buttons, and the data collected is linked to the individual by their IP address, which identifies the device that the visitor is using. Tracked conversions appear in the Ads Manager where they can be used to measure the effectiveness of your ads, to define custom audiences for ad targeting, for dynamic ads campaigns, and to analyze effectiveness of your website’s conversion funnels.” According to Meta, “It works by loading a small library of functions which you can use whenever a site visitor takes an action (called an event) that you want to track (called a conversion).
Facebook viewer code#
Meta Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code that is used to track visitor activity on a website.
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Hospitals are Sending Patient Data to FacebookĪn analysis of hospitals’ websites has revealed one-third of the top 100 hospitals in the United States are sending patient data to Facebook via a tracker called Meta Pixel, without apparently obtaining consent from patients.
Facebook viewer download#
Therefore, if you want to have a practical and simple way of accessing your Facebook account from your desktop, with the possibility to modify the corresponding options, all you have to do is download Facebook Viewer.Study Reveals One Third of Top 100 U.S. Furthermore, even though it uses the Internet Explorer engine to show the information, since it's totally independent from the browser, it won't close down even if you have problems with the browser. With Facebook Viewer it becomes much easier to be able to access the website's information.
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But this has its advantages, because you will be able to do without the web browser for this purpose, and it allows you to accomplish all the actions available by means of the browser. To be able to access Facebook it's necessary to use an Internet browser, but this will no longer be so thanks to Facebook Viewer.Īn interface to access Facebook from your desktop.īasically, Facebook Viewer is only an independent interface to be able to access this online service. The amount of Facebook users increases each day, something that causes people that already have an account to end up with even more friends and colleagues connected to them.
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