Hospitals push Congress to override HHS’ crackdown on third-party web trackers

The hospital lobby is calling on lawmakers to support their controversial use of third-party web tracking technologies that patients and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) view as a privacy breach.

Web traffic monitoring tools such as the Meta Pixel and Google Analytics are a mainstay on thousands of hospital websites, but since a June 2022 investigation from The Markup have become the focus of sometimes costly class action lawsuits.

In exchange for traffic monitoring metrics and insights for hospitals, the technologies gather and send identifiable information about users to outside parties, often without their knowledge. A recent study suggests that more than nine in 10 hospitals’ homepages have at least one third-party cookie.