"It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores. It’s happening for profit, for an “improved user experience,” and because developers have flocked to “free” plugins and tools provided by data-vacuuming companies.
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WebMD, for instance, is the 106th most-visited site in the US, according to Alexa, and figures prominently in search results for most commonly searched diseases. It sends third party requests to a whopping 34 separate domains, including the data brokers Experian and Acxiom.
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Even trusted, nonprofit public websites are tracking you—the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood, for example, each send your data to third parties like Google and Ensighten. This isn’t because either is intending to do anything nefarious; it’s just because they’ve installed convenient free software—but it is nonetheless sending data about the health issues you’re looking at to corporations."
Full article by Brian Merchant:
motherboard.vice.com/read/l...
Basis for Brian's article:
Pew Internet Research Centre assessment of Americans' use of internet technology for health purposes. Worth reading:
pewinternet.org/fact-sheets...
While reading Brian's article is rather alarmist, is there anything you can do to reduce this invasion into a particularly private part of our lives?
From Brian's article "Quintin says that there are things users can do to protect themselves from such tracking right now—install ad blockers like the Privacy Badger eff.org/privacybadger ."
The Firefox browser has add-ons like Adblock Edge or Adblock Plus, which work transparently and block ads that otherwise appear on your web pages and can track your browsing. If you are really keen, you can use NoScript, another Firefox add-on, which significantly improves your security, but it does take some investment to set up the first time you visit a new web page, as you have to work out what scripts your browser needs to run to render the web page so that you can view it and not enable scripts from sites that are linked in, but not required for you to view the page. There's also Ghostery, which "looks for third-party page elements (or "trackers") on the web pages you visit. These can be things like social network widgets, advertisements, invisible pixels used for tracking and analytics, and so on. Ghostery notifies you that these things are present, and which companies operate them. You can learn more about these companies, and if you wish, choose to block the trackers they operate." Ghostery and NoScript are highly recommended by those that particularly value their privacy. These add-ons or similar are available for other browsers that support add-ons.
Plus of course, there are plenty of tips in our community's security posts, which you can access through Online Security Starts with YOU!
healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...
One wag suggested we use this tracking to advantage by search(ing) for: "I feel too healthy" or "Why do I never get sick?"
Neil
