RadNet Secretly Discloses Patient Health Information to Facebook, Class Action Claims

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A proposed class action alleges RadNet, purportedly the country’s largest provider of diagnostic imaging services, secretly transmits website visitors’ personal health information to Facebook without consent.

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The 41-page lawsuit claims that when consumers navigate through RadNet’s website and online portal to communicate with doctors, view lab results, schedule medical appointments or find treatment options, their data and interactions are recorded and sent to Facebook without their knowledge, authorization or consent. The case says these alleged disclosures expose patients’ private medical details, including their diagnoses, treatment information, lab results, medications and appointment times. 

According to the filing, RadNet collects and shares patients’ personal information by using a Facebook tracking “pixel,” a snippet of programming code the social media company provides website owners to install on their web pages.

“Through this technology, Facebook intercepts each page a user visits, what buttons they click, as well as specific information they input into the website and what they searched,” the suit states, adding that the pixel also collects data points that reveal a website visitor’s identity, such as their IP address.

Another way the software can identify a RadNet.com user is by disclosing their Facebook ID, a “unique and persistent identifier that Facebook assigns to each user” that can be used to easily identify any individual with a Facebook account, the complaint says.

The lawsuit claims that RadNet, in return for the valuable consumer medical information it provides Facebook, receives analytics about ads they’ve placed on Facebook and Instagram and insight on other tools to “target people who have visited their website.”

The complaint contends that the plaintiff, a California resident, reasonably expected that her online communications with RadNet.com would remain confidential because she never consented for RadNet to disclose her data to Facebook, and the company otherwise never informed her that it would be making such disclosures.

In fact, RadNet’s privacy policy explicitly promises patients that their private medical information “will not be shared with anyone other than the appropriate and authorized RadNet staff, medical physicians, and payors,” and that users will be “notified when their information is being collected by any outside parties,” the suit relays. RadNet also assures consumers that they can opt out of having their information used “for purposes not directly related to the RadNet Web site,” although the plaintiff claims she was never given a chance to opt out of the disclosure of her data, the case alleges.

“Defendant disregarded Plaintiff’s and hundreds of thousands of other patients’ statutorily protected, constitutional, and common law privacy rights by intercepting and releasing their sensitive personal medical information to Facebook,” the complaint charges.

RadNet is far from the only company accused of unlawfully disclosing patient information by way of the Facebook tracking pixel, the filing shares. A June 2022 investigation by The Markup found that the Facebook pixel was embedded on the websites of 33 of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in the United States, all of which had been secretly collecting patients’ private health information and sharing it with the platform, the suit relays.

The lawsuit seeks to cover anyone in the United States who is, or was, a patient of RadNet and accessed an online website owned and/or operated by the company that caused a transmission of personally identifiable information, protected health information and other electronic communications to be made to Facebook.

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