Interesting video by Tim Libert, summarising the results of some research he did on the way health information sites (including those run by government agencies) covertly pass information about health-related searches to a host of commercial companies. Libert is a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He built a program called webXray to analyze the top 50 search results for nearly 2,000 common diseases (over 80,000 pages total). He found that no fewer that 91% of the pages made third-party requests to outside companies. So if you search for “cold sores,” for instance, and click the WebMD “Cold Sores Topic Overview” link, the site is passing your request for information about the disease along to “one or more (and often many, many more) other corporations”.

According to Libert’s research (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 58 No. 3, Pages 68-77), about 70% of the time, the data transmitted “contained information exposing specific conditions, treatments, and diseases.”

So think twice before consulting Dr Google. Especially if you think you might have a condition that might affect your insurance rating.