Costco Uses Tracking Tech to Disclose Online Pharmacy Customers’ Health Info to Third Parties, Class Action Alleges

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Costco faces a proposed class action lawsuit over its alleged use of a Meta Pixel on its website to secretly track and disclose the private and protected health information of millions of pharmacy customers to third parties without their knowledge or consent.

Have you recently filled or refilled a prescription on Costco’s pharmacy website? Do you have a Facebook account? Let us know here.

The 58-page lawsuit, filed in Washington on October 6, accuses the member-only warehouse retailer of blatantly violating state and federal privacy laws by failing to disclose, or otherwise intentionally omitting, that it shares information about consumers’ prescription orders and refills, health insurance coverage, immunization questions, Medicare details and other unique identifiers with Meta Platforms. 

The suit says that although Costco actively encourages patients and prospective patients to use its supposedly secure pharmacy site—Costco.com/pharmacy—the site nevertheless contains a snippet of online tracking code, e.g. the Meta Pixel, that tracks a user’s activity, logging, among other data, the pages and subpages a person visits, clicks around the site, searches, form submissions and non-anonymized personal information. 

“Indeed, [the] Pixel is routinely used to target specific customers by utilizing the data gathered through the Pixel to build profiles for the purpose of future targeting and marketing,” the lawsuit explains. “Here, the information transmitted to third-party Meta, without Plaintiffs’ consent, most certainly included private health information, which is some of the most personal and sensitive data Plaintiffs have.” 

According to the suit, the Meta Pixel also logs “the exact content” of a patient’s communications with the Costco pharmacy website and redirects that data to the social media company “in a fashion that identifies the person as a patient.” The case says that Costco’s use of the back-end tracking code allows for “a broad scope of information” to be disclosed to Meta while allowing Costco to “improve and save costs on its marketing campaigns” and bolster its data analytics to increase revenue, namely by attracting new patients and improving its services for existing ones. 

“Defendant also uses [the] Pixel to gain insight into patients, through secret tracking, that it could not otherwise have or use,” the case alleges. 

The complaint emphasizes the proposed class members’ private information, as a result of Costco’s alleged data sharing, will “likely be further exposed or disseminated to additional third parties.” 

The lawsuit looks to cover all individuals in the United States whose sensitive information was disclosed to a third party through Costco’s website without authorization or consent at any time between October 2020 and the time at which the court certifies the case as a bona fide class action. 

Have you recently filled or refilled a prescription on Costco’s pharmacy website? Do you have a Facebook account? Let us know here.