LAUSR

Health information privacy is a core value of American health. The privacy of communication between healthcare providers and patients is protected by law, but no equivalent protection exists for individuals performing health-related searches on patient-facing websites. Consumer aggregated data obtained from searches on patient-facing websites can be used to create a health profile and even merge it with non-health-related information. These data profiles can be sold to other companies or used to curate targeted advertisement that follows the individual user. While this information collection is acknowledged, the degree of such data releases and specificity to the individual is often unknown to individual users. Therefore, we used a privacy inspection tool to determine prevalence and type of data tracking from commonly searched government and non-government health-related websites.