Facebook has started blocking sensitive health information that third-party apps had been sharing with the social network in violation of its own rules, said New York officials who investigated the situation.
Data fed into a Facebook analytics tool by app makers included medical diagnoses and whether users were pregnant, according to a report shared by the New York State Financial Services Department (DFS) on Thursday.
The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS or NYSDFS) is the department of the New York state government responsible for regulating financial services and products, including those subject to the New York insurance, banking and financial services laws.
According to the report, following a report by the Wall Street Journal, the Governor directed DFS to perform an investigation which found that app developers regularly sent Facebook sensitive data, including medical and personal data, derived from consumers’ usage of third-party websites and applications. The data was then shared with Facebook by app developers as part of Facebook’s free online data analytics services. Though such data-sharing violated Facebook policy, Facebook took few steps to enforce the policy or to block the flow of sensitive data prior to the state’s investigation.
Investigators cited the example of a “Flo Health app” for menstruation and fertility tracking used by more than 100 million people informed Facebook each time a user logged starting her period or noted an intention to get pregnant.
“Large internet companies have a duty to protect the privacy of their consumers — period,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in the release.
Such sharing violated Facebook policy, but went unchecked by the California-based internet giant, investigators concluded.
Facebook created a list of terms blocked by its systems and has been refining artificial intelligence to more adaptively filtering sensitive data not welcomed in the analytics tool, according to the report. These terms were consolidated in a blocklist.
The blocklist contains more than 70,000 terms, including diseases, bodily functions, medical conditions, and real-world locations such as mental health centres, the report said.
The report endorsed a data privacy law proposed in the state by the governor that would expressly protect health, biometric, and location data as well as create a Consumer Data Privacy Bill of Rights.
