Patient-generated health data (PGHD), created and captured from patients via wearable devices and mobile apps, are proliferating outside of clinical settings. Examples include sleep tracking, fitness trackers, continuous glucose monitors, and RFID-enabled implants, with many additional biometric or health surveillance applications in development or envisioned. These data are included in growing stockpiles of personal health data being mined for insight via big data analytics and artificial intelligence/deep learning technologies. Governing these data resources to facilitate patient care and health research while preserving individual privacy and autonomy will be challenging, as PGHD are the least regulated domains of digitalized personal health data (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2018). When patients themselves collect digitalized PGHD using “apps” provided by technology firms, these data fall outside of conventional health data regulation, such as HIPAA. Instead, PGHD are maintained primarily on the information technology infrastructure of vendors, and data are governed under the IT firm’s own privacy policies and within the firm’s intellectual property rights. Dominant narratives position these highly personal data as valuable resources to transform healthcare, stimulate innovation in medical research, and engage individuals in their health and healthcare. However, ensuring privacy, security, and equity of benefits from PGHD willmore »
This content will become publicly available on November 7, 2023
All Eyes On Me: Inside Third Party Trackers' Exfiltration of PHI from Healthcare Providers' Online Systems
In the United States, sensitive health information is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This act limits the disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI) without the patient’s consent or knowledge. However, as medical care becomes web-integrated, many providers have chosen to use third-party web trackers for measurement and marketing purposes. This presents a security concern: third-party JavaScript requested by an online healthcare system can read the website’s contents, and ensuring PHI is not unintentionally or maliciously leaked becomes difficult. In this paper, we investigate health information breaches in online medical records, focusing on 459 online patient portals and 4 telehealth websites.
We find 14% of patient portals include Google Analytics, which reveals (at a minimum) the fact that the user visited the health provider website, while 5 portals and 4 telehealth websites con- tained JavaScript-based services disclosing PHI, including medications and lab results, to third parties. The most significant PHI breaches were on behalf of Google and Facebook trackers. In the latter case, an estimated 4.5 million site visitors per month were potentially exposed to leaks of personal information (names, phone numbers) and medical information (test results, medications). We notified healthcare providers of the PHI breaches and more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1903612
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10380003
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 197 to 211
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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