Bad data mining
Recently I received a flier in the mail from Bausch & Lomb, offering me a free sample of an over-the-counter allergy drug called Alaway (ketotifen fumarate ophthalmic solution). “Don’t suffer through another allergy season. Stop itchy eyes,” the mailer said.
How did Bausch & Lomb know I have hay fever? It could only be from my history of purchasing OTC decongestants like Claritin-D and Alavert-D (both are loratadine/pseudoephedrine combos). And the reason why drug companies know I was taking this medication is because federal law now requires a photo ID and a signature to purchase any products containing pseudoephedrine. (Thanks, meth heads, for inconveniencing millions of innocent people.)
Clearly, pharmacies are selling their pseudoephedrine purchase logs to pharma marketers. Some might call this legitimate use of my personal information for disease management purposes under the treatment/payment/operations exception to HIPAA. It feels more like a violation of my privacy.
Anyone else have similar thoughts?
That to me, is intrusion of privacy. It’s the same as going to stop n shop and using your discount card, which tracks all our purchases and preferences etc, or when I’m reading an email in Google about some public health issue, and I get ads for MPH courses in the side bar…that feels pretty much like intrusion of privacy. It is hard to draw a line though. Where does legitimate use for disease management end and breach of privacy begin?
It’s certainly an intrusion of privacy, seeing as you cannot opt-out of id’ing and signing when you purchase competitive products.@ideaman: It isn’t really comparable to a discount card, as you can elect (opt-out) to not use your discount card when purchasing sensitive products (be it condoms, OTC drugs, etc).Google on the other hand doesn’t give the advertisers any information about you. Google picks from it’s advertisers and shows them based on matching words (or something). If they sold you google-id to the advertisers, it would be similar…I’m kind of surprised that it’s legal (if this was the way they found your address) for the shops to sell your identity to them considering you’re probably required to produce an identity by law and can’t opt-out…