Friday, February 06, 2015

Is it morally conscientious to share personal data on a government website?

2/6

Healthcare.gov and State Sites Still Crawling With Ad Trackers


According to the article, this is the topology of several State Healthcare websites, including those that belong to California, Colorado. The analysis was done by investigators using the ad detection tool Ghostery.


The jist of the issue is that allowing 3rd party ad-tracking and publishing services to reside on State owned healthcare websites, whose customers may not have a choice to not visit, and then sharing any contact information entered while browsing on these sites with advertisers like Facebook and Google, is not morally sound.

By sharing contact info collected with 3rd party agents, a visitor may see targeted ads chosen as a result of a session browsing government healthcare sites, while they are on Facebook, and vise versa. Tracked individuals may receive emails or calls or postal mail that is generated from such a multi-channel ad-targeting approach. There seems to be a trend to install additional ad-tracking software on these State-owned websites. During the month of January 2015, the number of ad-tracking software on Colorado’s ConnectForHealthCO.com went up from 25 – 32.

According to Ghostery CEO Scott Meyer, such a multichannel strategy is not surprising given that the content publisher is spending big money on digital marketing campaigns.

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