The vast majority of U. S. hospitals share their visitors’ knowledge with big tech companies.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently analyzed 100 non-federal acute care hospitals (those with emergency rooms) across the country and found that 96% of them passed user data to third parties. As if that wasn’t enough, the team was only able to publicly locate that they had privacy policies in place on 71% of the sites.

Of the privacy policies, just over the portion (56. 3%) revealed that a third party would obtain the user’s data.

Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a study participant, told the Register that the effects are incomprehensible. That said, it’s not extraordinarily surprising.

Last year, the same researchers published a similar study of 3,747 hospital websites. This report found that 98. 6% of sites track and transfer user knowledge to various third parties, aggregating knowledge brokers, advertising companies, and social media companies, all of which use detailed insights to sell targeted ads.

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