As per the news reports, it has been detected that Meta is facing a federal lawsuit against the fact that private medical data is being secretly shared with the famous social media platform Facebook when patients access their healthcare providers’ web portals.
On Friday, June 17, Bloomberg reported that the suit is seeking the class-action status and the Facebook Pixel tracking tool used to redirect the patient communications and other “secure” information without any further permissions.
The case has been filed against the data collection platform as John Doe seeks compensatory and punitive damages. Citing a nonprofit news organization, The Markup, there are around 33 hospitals that are utilizing the Facebook tracking tool, which could violate federal health information privacy laws, as revealed by Bloomberg.
When the comments started rising, Meta was not immediately available.
The fine has been posted on the company, which amounts to around $3.2 billion in the United Kingdom, stemming from allegations that it exploited data and abused its market dominance.
Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a senior adviser to the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), mentioned in January that she was bringing the class-action case on behalf of British Facebook users who used the platform between the years 2015 and 2019.
In that particular suit, it was claimed that Facebook was earning billions of pounds by performing unfair terms and conditions, which forced its users to sacrifice their valuable personal data to access the popular social network.
Facebook responded at the time by mentioning that people who are using the services facilitated by Meta did so because it was valuable for them, and “they have meaningful control of what information they share on the platform of Meta and with whom.”
But Gormsen made a contradictory comment on this – there is a “dark side” to Facebook in that it allegedly abused its market dominance and used various unfair terms and conditions on users by collecting data with the help of Pixel. The concept generated an “all-seeing picture” of internet usage, providing detailed profiles of users.
France’s antitrust watchdog has also approved commitments that were designed by Meta regarding the French online advertising sector. The company agreed to provide access to its advertising inventories and campaign data over a five-year period.
