The investigative journalism site, The Markup, revealed in its June 16 story, Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites, that 33 top hospitals in the country have been sharing patient data with Facebook via trackers embedded on their websites known as Meta Pixels.

Jonathan Mayer

The Markup was able to discover the tracking using tools co-developed by a team of CITP computer scientists led by Princeton Computer Science Professor Jonathan Mayer, a member of CITP’s faculty. The coding CITP designed allowed The Markup site to see how Facebook’s Meta Pixel tracked ordinary patients who were logging into patient portals.

CITP built the tools as part of a Mozilla Rally research initiative that uses crowdsourcing to investigate the behaviors of platforms like Facebook. As a result of the Markup’s reporting, several hospitals removed the Meta Pixels from their websites.

Read more about CITP’s work with Mozilla in the following links:

• Take control over your data with Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform
• Mozilla Teams Up with Professor Jonathan Mayer and Other Princeton and Stanford Researchers to Take Control of Your Data with Rally