Lawsuit Investigation: Did Wellstar Share Your Health Info with Facebook?
Last Updated on May 20, 2024
Investigation Complete
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org have finished their investigation into this matter.
Check back for any potential updates. The information on this page is for reference only.
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At A Glance
- This Alert Affects:
- Wellstar Health System patients who visited Wellstar.org or MyChart.Wellstar.org within the past two years and also have a Facebook account.
- What’s Going On?
- Attorneys working with ClassAction.org believe Wellstar may be using tracking tools on its website and associated online portal to secretly share patients’ private health information with Facebook. They’re now looking into whether a class action lawsuit can be filed against Wellstar over potential privacy violations.
- How Could a Lawsuit Help?
- A successful class action lawsuit could help compensate affected patients for any violations of their privacy rights. It could also force Wellstar to change its data-sharing practices.
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org believe that Wellstar—one of the largest healthcare systems in Georgia with a network of hospitals, urgent care locations, medical offices and other facilities—may be violating state and federal wiretapping laws by sharing patients’ private information without permission.
They suspect that Wellstar’s website and online portal may be using tracking technology to collect data about users and send it to Facebook for advertising purposes. It’s possible that these tools may reveal highly sensitive information about patients, such as details about their medical symptoms, conditions, treatments, prescriptions and appointments.
How Could Wellstar Be Sharing Data with Facebook?
Many website operators gather data about the people who visit their websites by using an invisible tracking tool called the Meta (formerly known as Facebook) pixel.
The pixel, which can be embedded on any webpage, can be programmed to record every action a visitor takes, such as the buttons they click, the searches they perform and the content they view. In general, the data collected by a website through the Meta pixel can be used by both the website operator and the social media giant to better target advertisements to their users.
In this case, attorneys are specifically looking into whether Wellstar.org and MyChart.Wellstar.org are tracking patients in a manner that exposes their personal and medical information.
They have reason to believe that Wellstar’s suspected data-sharing practices may violate certain wiretapping laws, which prohibit the interception and disclosure of an individual’s electronic communications without their consent.
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