How the NHS has been sharing YOUR personal details with Facebook without your ... trends now
NHS trusts have been sharing the private medical information of patients with Facebook via a covert tracking tool on their websites, a probe has found.
The tracking tool was being used by the webpages of 20 NHS trusts to collect browsing information before sharing it with tech giant Meta, Facebook's parent company.
The major privacy breach, uncovered by The Observer, included intimate details about patients' medical conditions, appointments and treatments.
Data obtained by the Meta Pixel tool could then be used by the social media giant for business purposes, including targeted advertising.
The probe found 17 of the 20 NHS trusts using the tool, which serve more than 22 million patients in England, had pulled the tracker from their websites over the weekend.
A page on the Alder Hey Children's Hospital NHS Foundation Trust website about disorders of sex development, which was found to have shared details about browsing
Data obtained by the Meta Pixel tool could then be used by the social media giant for business purposes
Many of the trusts said they had installed the tracking pixels to monitor recruitment or charity campaigns and were not aware that they were sending patient data to Facebook.
But information was collected from patients who visited NHS webpages about self-harm, sexual health and cancer.
One of the trusts, the Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS group, previously said in its privacy policy that 'confidential personal information about your health and care... would never be used for marketing purposes without your explicit consent'.
In one case, it was revealed the trust shared when a patient had viewed a handbook for HIV medication before sending the name of the drug, the user's IP address and details of their Facebook page to Meta.
