In Germany, the Doctolib medical platform would have transferred to Facebook and also to the Outbrain advertising network the terms searched by its users in its search engine. A practice abandoned but which must also have existed on the French site.
You will also be interested
[EN VIDÉO] Counterfeiting: beware of drugs sold on the Internet Counterfeiting affects all sectors, even the drug industry. Copies mimic the name and form of existing treatments but do not contain an active ingredient. Worse, some can even be dangerous. The Anti-Counterfeit Medicines Research Institute (IRACM) tells us about it in this video.
Not seen not caught ! Doctolib is the entry point for the vast majority of French people to make an appointment for a test PCR or else the vaccination against the Covid-19 and the site would have sent the keywords entered by users in its search engine to its partners Facebook and Outbrain. Information that was published by the German media Mobilize. If we can now find no trace on the French site of this collection, it must be said that the practice was stopped dead on June 21 on all of the firm’s platforms. Doctolib reacted quickly as soon as this case was revealed on June 18 by the media. Priding itself on guaranteeing the security of health-related data, Doctolib has already been the victim of attempts to hack its database and it also has a reputation for opacity on the management of this data and its future. This is what earned him the Big Brother 2021 prize from the association, again German, Digitalcourage.
In the case of data sharing with Facebook and the Outbrain advertising agency, the facts concern the German platform and more precisely its application for mobile, but there is no reason that this process was only used in this country and not the others.
To measure the success of marketing operations according to Doctolib
Concretely, from the moment an Internet user accepts the conditions of the service as soon as he enters a keyword relating to symptoms medical or illness, the data was sent directly to both entities with the user’s IP address and marketing ID. This is exactly the type of elements sought to refine the display of ads on the number One of social networks and advertising management.
Given that hundreds of thousands of people use the site to make appointments and also to do research, the exploitation of this data has certainly had a significant impact on what is displayed on the computers and mobiles of its users. . For his part, Doctolib defends itself with little credibility, arguing that this collection from the two partners was used to measure the success of the platform’s marketing campaigns. The firm would also have asked its partners to delete all the data collected via cookies.
Interested in what you just read?