Cedars-Sinai Health System and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center are healthcare entities who operate a website and mobile app to communicate with around a million patients. But the complaint for this class action alleges that when patients take action on these sites, including entering what should be protected health information (PHI), the companies allow companies like Meta, Google, and Bing to intercept and record this information for marketing purposes.
The class for this action is all persons living in California who used the Cedars-Sinai website at any time when tracking code able to share data for marketing or website analytics purposes was present.
Cedars-Sinai makes their website available to patients for a number of purposes, the complaint alleges: “It encourages patients to use this Website to research their medical symptoms and health issues, identify doctors who can treat their specific conditions, make appointments with these doctors, and take other actions related to their personal health care.” This inevitably involves entering private information, including personally identifiable information (PII) as well as PHI through the website.
According to the complaint, Cedars-Sinai has embedded bits of tracking code into its website that send information back to various marketing entities, and it does this without the patients’ knowledge or consent. The complaint alleges, “This code served as a real time wiretaps on patients’ communications” and did not benefit the patients but only Cedars-Sinai.
How did this work? “By way of illustration,” the complaint alleges, “if a patient made an appointment with a doctor for treatment of cancer, the tracking code Cedars-Sinai put on its Website conveyed that information to Meta, which in turn allowed Meta to include that patient in marketing target groups that it offered to its other advertising clients who wanted to market to cancer patients.”
The Meta pixel was removed from the website in July 2022, but the complaint suggests it was particularly intrusive, because if patients were signed in to Facebook at the time they visited the website, the pixel would obtain their Facebook ID numbers, which allowed the patients to be linked to their Facebook account and identified.
Google Analytics connected the information it collected to the patients’ IP addresses, the complaint alleges, and while it offers an IP Anonymization Tool, the complaint alleges that Cedars-Sinai does not use it.
The complaint also names two other marketing entities to which patient information is passed.
Among the laws this sharing of private information violates, the complaint claims, are the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and the privacy rights acknowledged in California’s constitution and common law.
Article Type: LawsuitTopic: Privacy
Most Recent Case Event
Cedars-Sinai Shares Medical Information with Marketing Companies California Complaint
February 3, 2023
Cedars-Sinai Health System and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center are healthcare entities who operate a website and mobile app to communicate with around a million patients. But the complaint for this class action alleges that when patients take action on these sites, including entering what should be protected health information (PHI), the companies allow companies like Meta, Google, and Bing to intercept and record this information for marketing purposes.
Cedars-Sinai Shares Medical Information with Marketing Companies California ComplaintCase Event History
Cedars-Sinai Shares Medical Information with Marketing Companies California Complaint
February 3, 2023
Cedars-Sinai Health System and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center are healthcare entities who operate a website and mobile app to communicate with around a million patients. But the complaint for this class action alleges that when patients take action on these sites, including entering what should be protected health information (PHI), the companies allow companies like Meta, Google, and Bing to intercept and record this information for marketing purposes.
Cedars-Sinai Shares Medical Information with Marketing Companies California Complaint