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US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

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Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#111

The actual "sharing" was using the Meta pixel and TikTok's equivalent, presumably so the healthcare exchanges could do retargeting or similarity-based marketing to get people to sign up for health care coverage. Which, narrowly, seems like a reasonable thing to do. But of course using the pixel automatically "shares" the data with Meta/ByteDance/whoever, and they get to use it for whatever nefarious purpose they want…

The state healthcare exchanges doing any kind of targeting and/or marketing, even to 'get people' to sign up for subsidized healthcare, could also be conceived of as unreasonable. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't think their mandate under the ACA contemplates any targeting or marketing of themselves whatsoever—even if it's ostensibly to increase enrollment.

That it feels like there's an implicit assumption that they would (target or market) seems to be part of the problem.

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#112
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got rich because people were stupid enough to think free services come without a cost.

People prefer to pay with tracking data instead of money because they have lots of tracking data and not much money.

And also because they don’t realize how effectively that tracking data can be used to manipulate their emotions and behavior with the goal of squeezing out what money they do have.

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#113
post #30

> Nearly all of the 20 state-run health insurance exchanges in the US have added advertising trackers that transmit user activity ...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…

>...why? 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.

> They want to know how many people are using their site and how.

Yeah, why?

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#114
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of this kind of comment? Have pro-citizen anti-corporate laws never been passed in the past?

"Citizens" United (which allows unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech", for those out of the loop) has fundamentally changed the core incentive structures of the modern political landscape. To compare a pre-CU world to a post-CU world when it comes to matters at the intersection of corporate interests and government regulatory / legislative power is comparing apples to oranges. We nee…

> We need to overturn CU

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.

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#115
post #101
post #98

Can someone from the US explain what race even means in this context and how it is determined?

Yes, this is a common point of confusion when talking to Europeans about racial issues in the US (as I found out myself recently). Race in our contexts refers to your background/birthplace/heritage. On our government forms: "What race are you?" "White, black, hispanic, etc." This is fundamentally different by intent than in Europe (using french here) where we refer to 'la race humaine' which is the _species_. The nua…

> background/birthplace/heritage

Are those slashes AND or OR?

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#116
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most long contracts are a reaction to 'failure to warn' lawsuits where plaintiffs (successfully) argued that they should have been notified of something. The problem is that when you add up all those 'somethings', you get absurdly long documents.

In effect it seems that people are still not being warned. The legal fiction that they are is exactly the insanity that needs to be thrown out.

I agree that these extensive disclaimers and contracts are not an effective way to communicate information, but dispensing with them will require either a better way to disclaim many (relatively unimportant) risks, or a change to product (and service) liability law, reducing failure-to-warn legal risk.

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#118
post #98

Can someone from the US explain what race even means in this context and how it is determined?

It is self reported according to the US census recognized racial categories: white, black, asian, native American/Alaskan, native Hawaiian or Pacific islander, and other (or two+ categories). Hispanic/latino identification is a separate box you check for reasons that are hard to explain without going over decades of bureaucratic decisions.

> US census recognized racial categories

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.

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#119
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relevant facts are that the website owner voluntarily put the tracking code on their own website, and the tracking code worked as designed.

> The relevant facts are that the website owner voluntarily put the tracking code... The civil discussion should now be about the punishment for that. Regulation is required for handling people's data

Sounds like that will work similar to incarcerating drug users instead of the drug makers and distribution network?

Re: US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least make it an explicitly protected right to lie about your race in any context. It's a lot easier to ruin a dataset than it is to hide from it.

What would happen if you just lied? I guess you wouldn't get healthcare coverage once they found out? But isn't there something in law about material damages, they'd have to prove you cost them money by choosing the wrong race?

If it's an official government form, there's usually verbiage stating that knowingly and willingly falsifying information is considered perjury or some such wording.
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