Spokesman Aaron Albright said outside vendors "are prohibited from using information from these tools on HealthCare.gov for their companies' purposes." The government uses them to measure the performance of HealthCare.gov so consumers get "a simpler, more streamlined and intuitive experience," he added.
It's one thing to send session length, general location, usage stuff like that to see where, for example, awareness campaigns might be needed. But really:
That's a bit much! And I suppose DoubleClick is carefully siloing this information so it doesn't accidentally perform all kinds of analysis on it for comparison with its other huge databases? Perhaps they are barred from selling it wholesale to data brokers but I can't imagine they are unable to use it for plenty of their own purposes.
I think the analogy would be like opening a Government Bank where the doors are always wide open and there are no locks. Everyone can see everyone account status or simply come in and grab their jewls or gold coins, but they won't because generally
[...] citizens "are prohibited by law from stealing other people's belongings"
I agree. On the surface, this looks ridiculous and I am very surprised. Hopefully there is a good explanation... but pregnancy status as a query parameter? I don't understand what that could be other than data mining.
I'm sure you're right that the information is getting used by DoubleClick.
To the other point about this information not being appropriate for the purposes Albright mentioned: Isn't this exactly the information that a health insurance company wants to know for outreach? If I know that all the pregnant women in Tuscon are signing up but none from Pheonix, I suddenly know where to put my next billboard or field office.
If this was a private sector company, nobody would be surprised at collecting this data. It would also be a different story if the data was being stored and analyzed in house or even if the doubleclick request happened on the server side instead of the client.
I agree with the general sentiment that this is a privacy violation, but that's because of the way that the data is collected and who processes it, not the collection and use of the data generally.
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Spokesman Aaron Albright said outside vendors "are prohibited from using information from these tools on HealthCare.gov for their companies' purposes." The government uses them to measure the performance of HealthCare.gov so consumers get "a simpler, more streamlined and intuitive experience," he added.
It's one thing to send session length, general location, usage stuff like that to see where, for example, awareness campaigns might be needed. But really:
That's a bit much! And I suppose DoubleClick is carefully siloing this information so it doesn't accidentally perform all kinds of analysis on it for comparison with its other huge databases? Perhaps they are barred from selling it wholesale to data brokers but I can't imagine they are unable to use it for plenty of their own purposes.I think the analogy would be like opening a Government Bank where the doors are always wide open and there are no locks. Everyone can see everyone account status or simply come in and grab their jewls or gold coins, but they won't because generally
[...] citizens "are prohibited by law from stealing other people's belongings"
It would be interesting to hear a perspective from some of the HNers that actually worked on the re-build of HealthCare.gov
I agree. On the surface, this looks ridiculous and I am very surprised. Hopefully there is a good explanation... but pregnancy status as a query parameter? I don't understand what that could be other than data mining.
And knowing that someone is pregnant is extremely valuable to advertisers[0]
[0] http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/
I'm sure you're right that the information is getting used by DoubleClick.
To the other point about this information not being appropriate for the purposes Albright mentioned: Isn't this exactly the information that a health insurance company wants to know for outreach? If I know that all the pregnant women in Tuscon are signing up but none from Pheonix, I suddenly know where to put my next billboard or field office.
If this was a private sector company, nobody would be surprised at collecting this data. It would also be a different story if the data was being stored and analyzed in house or even if the doubleclick request happened on the server side instead of the client.
I agree with the general sentiment that this is a privacy violation, but that's because of the way that the data is collected and who processes it, not the collection and use of the data generally.
Confused...