Kaiser Permanente Shares Website Visitors’ Info with Third Parties, Class Action Says [UPDATE]

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims healthcare service group Kaiser Permanente secretly shares the personal data of website visitors with numerous third parties without consent.

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The 65-page lawsuit says that Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and the Permanente Medical Group, Inc.—which together operate as Kaiser Permanente—have embedded into Healthy.KaiserPermanente.org a host of coded tracking tools that are designed to intercept and disclose users’ private data to third parties without their knowledge or consent.

The suit argues that by using web trackers to capture and record every movement a visitor makes on the Kaiser Permanente website, the defendants have violated state and federal laws and illegally disclosed patients’ private information and communications to third parties, including Quantum Metric, Adobe, Bing, Google, Twitter and DoubleClick.

Per the case, patients with Kaiser Permanente health plans—the largest healthcare service plan in the country—have access to hundreds of Kaiser Permanente hospitals and healthcare facilities. Moreover, Kaiser patients can use Healthy.KaiserPermanente.org to log into the patient portal, schedule appointments, search for physicians and locations, check medical results, pay bills, communicate directly with providers and more, the filing says.

Despite the website’s privacy statement, which falsely promises that no personally identifiable information is collected and that data is captured only to improve the site, the Kaiser website nevertheless utilizes Quantum Metric’s “session replay” code—which can record and play back individual browsing sessions— in addition to Adobe Experience Cloud, Bing Ads, Google Analytics code, Google DoubleClick and Twitter Analytics, tools that secretly intercept and share visitor activity in real time, the complaint claims.

Per the filing, if a patient, for example, clicks “Doctors & Locations” on the website in order to search for a physician or book an appointment, the web-tracking tools can capture and transmit directly to the third parties large amounts of personal data, including the patient’s search requests, medical treatment details, the contents of any real-time communications with providers and other sensitive information.

The plaintiff, a California resident and Kaiser Permanente health plan member, regularly uses the website to review his medical information and message providers, the lawsuit relays. In an “egregious” invasion of privacy, Kaiser Permanente “intentionally” allowed the named third parties to “wiretap” the man’s interactions and on-page communications, the case charges.

The lawsuit looks to represent any Kaiser Permanente health plan members in the United States who used Healthy.KaiserPermanente.org, including those who used the patient portal on the website.

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