Kroger, America’s beloved supermarket giant, is being sued for allegedly violating HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) by secretly tracking and revealing the private health information of consumers to third parties (such as Meta (META) -)) while they browse the supermarket’s website.
The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Ohio on Nov. 10, alleges that Kroger “planted a bug on patients’ web browsers that forced them (to) disclose private and confidential Communications to third parties,” the lawsuit read.
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Personal information that the unauthorized third parties obtained revealed consumers’ identities, the health care they were looking for and received, the prescription medications they were on and the dosages they were given.
“In turn, these disclosures allow third parties to reasonably infer that a specific patient was being treated for a specific type of medical condition such as cancer, pregnancy, HIV, mental health conditions, and an array of other symptoms or conditions,” according to the lawsuit.
According to HIPAA, which protects an individual's private health information, “no health care provider including pharmacies” is allowed to reveal a person’s health information to a third party without written consent from that person.
It also claims that the Meta Pixel tracking tool, which was one of the tools that Kroger allegedly used to track consumers’ information, allows Facebook to connect user data from Kroger’s website to the individual’s Facebook profile, which reveals the identity of the user.
“Patients simply do not anticipate or expect that their trusted healthcare provider will send personal health information or confidential medical information regarding their prescriptions to a hidden third party—let alone social media networks and online advertisers like Facebook which have sordid histories of privacy violations in pursuit of ever-increasing advertising revenue—without patient consent,” the lawsuit read.
This is not the first time Kroger has faced privacy concerns regarding its website. The supermarket giant was previously accused in February of revealing the user ID of consumers who were shopping for a pregnancy test on its website to companies such as Meta, Pinterest, Google, Snapchat and others.
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