Was reading Gizmodo this morning and came across some mighty interesting stuff.  I'll try to summarize a bit, but you may want to check out the original article over here.

 

 

 

 

Tracking cookies and URL requests are pretty common these days, but tracking an incredible amount of your personal medical history, status and other factors should be extremely concerning.  It's come to light that embedded within Healthcare.gov are a large amount of tracking URLs and requests that are sending this information to sites like Doubleclick, Yahoo, Chartbeat, and even Twitter and Youtube!!  (There is a chart in the original article showing a partial list of these external sites Healthcare.gov is sending stuff to!)

 

These requests and info are sent REGARDLESS of if you have options like "Do Not Track" activated within your browser!!!!

 

So say you've put all your info into the government site looking for healthcare (they ask a lot of personal questions to even GET a quote) and you go to the end and have to click the button to see your options.  Well embedded into that is something like that following:

https://4037109.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=...type=20142003;cat=201420;ord=7917385912018;~oref=https://www.healthcare.gov/seeplans/85601/results/county=04019&age=40&smoker=1&parent=&pregnant=1&mec=&zip=85601&state=AZ&income=35000& &step=4?

*edit*  I forgot to put this in here.  The above embed is a redirect of data to Doubleclick, which is collecting your pregnancy status, smoking status, age, ANNUAL INCOME!!, zip code, state, and a few other things.   

 

Doubleclick already collects a metric fuckton of personal data, and could match up a lot of that stuff with other information about you.  Sending stuff to places like Google (which uses "real names" now) could absolutely personally identify exactly who you are, what you read/browse, along with all your medical info, income, etc.  This is a huge problem. 

 

 

What do you think of this?

I am in the industry and honestly the GOV doesn't know what it is doing, there are regulations that haven't even been written yet from the law, it really changes at least week to week, its hard to implement something when they don't even know what "it" is. 

Doubleclick, a GOOGLE subsidiary. Google is bad. Been trying to tell people for ages, and no one seems to listen until things like this come out. This is exactly why I refuse to install Chrome onto my PC.

 

Google is dirty. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a direct pipeline to the Utah Data Center from Google Search. Exabytes of our data. Exabytes.

PK, you're not crazy.  You never have been.  There is so much scary stuff it's not even funny.

No, PK is crazy, but he just happens to be right. lawl.

 

I never signed up for Obamacare even when I was applicable, because I knew anything on that site would be fucked.