this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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The article seems a little light on any single fact but does anyone know if there's any actual data that shows personal disability information being recorded/collected? Is the tracking code being served both on the public side and in the logged in portion of the portal? Absolutely no meaningful information was provided.
I know we can sue a sandwich, is this one of these lawsuits? "I found Google tracking code on the DMV site so it's time to earn my retirement" sort of thing?
So it's not like they were skimming the medical info provided, but if you went to the DMV page, Google knew what you clicked.
So they pulled all that.
But because they didn't set it up to exclude anything about disability plates, it violated a specific law in California from the 90s.
It's valid, although I doubt Google intended to gather info specifically on people with disabilities, they don't respect the law to ensure they follow it, they grab everything and pay settlements later if they need to.
This is America
I think that's a very apt summary of the case. It's our super-lotto.
Everyone knows(like even my elderly mom) that Google, FB, etc follow you everywhere and that they use that data. I would have no doubt those sites knew she was disabled long before she visited the DMV site. It looks like she just found a way to monetize it.
Yeah, like we don't even blink when someone's Google searches before a crime are brought up in a trial...
Like, they don't have a time machine to go check once your caught.
They can get it, because they're saving everyone's.
We don't have a real left wing party to fight for us on this stuff. Just two pro-corporate parties constantly after donations.
We need people to stop just accepting this is how it has to be, it's not like this in every country.
And lawsuits like this get us talking about it at least.
That's basically the crux of the case right? The law is pretty clear, Google can't collect that data (or at least, if they do, then they'd have to comply with a long list of privacy regulations that I'm pretty sure they don't comply with).
It's basically similar to this example from the health field:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-hhs-warn-hospital-systems-telehealth-providers-about-privacy-security-risks-online-tracking
Like givesomefucks said, it's probably not that they were actually after that information specifically, but that it just got caught up in regular website analytics that services put on their sites. You can still infer a lot about a person's health information by just looking at the URLs they visit, so I'd say it is a concern but I'm not sure it should go beyond companies/agencies/organizations needing to know about the risks and a "stop doing this" warning. If analytics services were doing this intentionally and evaluating and using that data explicitly at the direction of some human in their company, then I think it would be a much bigger issue and a much bigger story.