A tweet by Pat Walshe (Privacy Matters) đž alerted me to an article published in The Register, noting that 96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers. Everything mentioned in the article adds to research I’ve led on the use of ad tracking tech – especially Facebook (or more accurately, Meta) Pixel – in New Zealand.
The Register’s article noted,
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals â essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments â and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties. Additionally, not all of these websites even had a privacy policy. And of the 71 percent that did, 56 percent disclosed specific third-party companies that could receive user information. “It’s shocking, and really kind of incomprehensible,” said Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who â along with Matthew McCoy, Angela Wu, Sam Burdyl, Yungjee Kim, Noell Kristen Smith, and Rachel Gonzales â authored the paper.
In research into the use of ad tech in New Zealand last year, I referred to a similar story in the United Kingdom published in the Guardian. The article noted,
NHS trusts are sharing intimate details about patientsâ medical conditions, appointments and treatments with Facebook without consent and despite promising never to do so. An Observer investigation has uncovered a covert tracking tool in the websites of 20 NHS trusts which has for years collected browsing information and shared it with the tech giant in a major breach of privacy. The data includes granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. It is matched to the userâs IP address â an identifier linked to an individual or household â and in many cases details of their Facebook account.
I was curious to see if any of the websites of New Zealand’s healthcare providers also used Facebook Pixel tracking technology. Downloaded lists of public, and private hospitals in the country from the Ministry of Health.
Several public hospitals in New Zealand actively use Facebook Pixel tracking technology without any disclosure. Health Point NZ’s Pixel configuration is awry, but the presence of cookie on site shows intention to track all site visits. Meta Pixel tracks all users, across all platforms, across the entire web, and Meta’s own product, and platform surfaces.
Several private hospitals in New Zealand actively use Facebook Pixel tracking tech as well, again sans any disclosure. Some are incorrectly configured, but again show intent to (clandestinely) track all users. This is clearly not good, and has implications on privacy at a country level, and societal scale.
Meta Pixel ad tech’s use in New Zealand’s public, and private health sectors should be a scandal, but tracks with what I have encountered, since 2023, is a completely laissez-faire attitude by country’s regulators, including the Privacy, and Electoral Commissions. It may, of course, signal their ignorance, because I can find little to no evidence of either institution comprehending contemporary threats, and risks to information, as well as democratic integrity.
It gets worse.
New Zealand’s leading corporations, and their websites use Meta Pixel ad tech to track all users. All that data is now fodder for micro-targeted, hyper-personalised political campaigning. The risk is real, as an article published on The Verge highlighted.
Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that ânearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.â In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the studyâs participants.
When this Verge piece came out, used a Stuff article from 2023 to ascertain Facebook Pixel usage in New Zealand’s “…10 most powerful publicly listed retailers, ranked by their market capitalisation, annual sales, store footprint and size of their workforce.”
Every single New Zealand company listed in this article, bar Hallenstein Glasson uses Meta Pixel, and some, more than one Pixel per site. Implementations of Meta Pixel also vary, from less to far more intrusive (i.e., capturing more data per visit, and user). Every single page load, leave aside purchase, is persistently tracked, & co-related with other sites.
Worth noting that not a single commercial website disclosed the use of Meta Pixel, just like not a single political party website using it discloses it either, despite Meta’s specific instructions around disclosure. This is unacceptable, because of what it allows – which I doubt many using Meta’s products, and app know.
At the time, I noted on Bluesky, “New Zealanders are looking at hoovering of data through widely used, undisclosed ad tech, available commercially, & already used in unprecedented manner to target pol. campaigns in 2023 general election. All this will evolve at pace. The key question is: Are country’s institutions fit for purpose?”.
To wit, Meta Pixel ad tech was used in an unprecedented manner in New Zealand’s 2023 general election. The Disinformation Project was the only entity in New Zealand to warn against it. Not a single news platform picked it up then, or has to date (more on this below).
As of 15 January 2024, save for Labour, all of the other political party websites featured Meta Pixel tracking. The privacy of millions of New Zealander’s (and non-citizens in the country who visit the sites) are impacted, aside from others who access these sites from elsewhere.
Things were worse in the run up to the general election in 2023. A LinkedIn post penned at the time noted,
Not everyday one discovers, and investigates the invasion of privacy of around 3.8 million eligible voters in New Zealand through the clandestine use of Facebook Pixel by country’s 4 leading political parties. It’s unprecedented in NZ’s electoral history. As quote in [The Disinformation Project] press release stresses, this isn’t a partisan issue, but risks undermining liberal democratic foundations, & electoral integrity esp. in context of 2023 general election just few weeks hence.
I went on to say,
Micro-targeting of ads, pervasive tracking, persuasive content delivery, clandestine interest, & behaviour modelling, aside from invasion of privacy at unprecedented scale are just some of the issues raised by Facebook Pixel’s use by the four political parties in New Zealand.
All this tracks with what political parties in the UK, and Europe have also done clandestinely.
What I’ve unearthed around Meta Pixel’s use in New Zealand since mid-2023 renders concerns around ad tech’s use in the country published in 2021 by NZ Council for Civil Liberties quaint in comparison. The use since 2021 seems to have grown inexorably, and exponentially.
Meta’s ad tech alone (leave aside comparable, and prevalent tracking tech by Google et al) perversely, and pervasively tracks what New Zealanders see/study/save/read/visit on public, & private health provider websites, nearly all leading companies, and both during, and since 2023’s general election, nearly all the leading political parties. This perennial tracking is the foundation for persuasive influence operations, and disinformation exacerbating affective polarisation in society, in a context where social cohesion’s evaporating at pace in New Zealand.
Astonishingly, no one in the country is talking about any of this. There’s 0 media coverage, no official censure, no institutional awareness (much less regulatory or legislative oversight, draft laws, policies, guidelines or best practices), and I can’t find any academic, policy, or even civil society capture of the state-of-play either.
In January, again on Bluesky, I wrote about Meta’s ad tech, and said “But let me also say, and with a measure of sadness, that it’s been very telling that not a single journalist or news platform approached TDP around our research, or press release at the time, and to date. As Jean Paul Sartre ‘Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.'” It’s clear that on just this score, both the Privacy Commission and Electoral Commission of New Zealand arenât fit for purpose, & allow for harms – both now, & into future – at a societal scale. Sans oversight, thereâs no remedy.
As to why there’s no media coverage in New Zealand, a possible explanation lies in the fact that a couple of the leading platforms also use Meta Pixel on their websites!
One can, I suppose, hardly expect media platforms that benefit from Meta Pixel’s ad tech to be critical of it. Cui bono? Clearly, who doesn’t benefit is the New Zealand public. Meta Pixel, and all ad tech, is a party blind threat to democracy.
A section of a podcast between Ezra Klein & Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei highlights, to my mind, the very high probability ad tech data being used in tandem with generative AI content to shape public perceptions at scale (beyond whatever being done today). This is an important point for those in New Zealand worried about the likes of Atlas Network, and other transnational, strategic, sophisticated influence operations well entrenched, and expanding at pace in the country (something else I’ve studied in some depth at The Disinformation Project, and for a while).
Parenthetically, the entire podcast is well worth listening to and/or reading transcript of (the hyperlink is a gift link for non-subscribers).
In the US, there are lawyers already advertising how the use of Meta Pixel is a privacy violation that can (and arguably should) be contested in court. This technology tracks users whether or not they are logged into Facebook. For the record, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is the only official site I can find in New Zealand featuring a clear disclosure around embedded ad tech. Perhaps after NZCCL’s 2021 censure/press release the Police, DoC, and Waka Kotahi NZTA no longer feature Meta Pixel. But the threat of ad tech, and just the use of Meta Pixel across some of the most visited, and important websites in the country, is a party blind threat to democracy in a country now defined by worsening post-pandemic affective polarisation, socio-political division, and hyper-partisan discourse – highlighted by recent Ipsos NZ polling data.
As research from the United States warns us,
Woolley at UT Austin warned that new artificial intelligence tools available to campaigns in this cycle will parse all this data faster and enable campaigns to quickly generate ads uniquely tailored to individual voters. âIt is microtargeted,â said EPICâs Fitzgerald. âItâs no longer the case that itâs just like every voter in Missouri is seeing the same ad. You are being chosen for that ad based on all the data about you. And your friends arenât seeing the same information. So any conversations youâre having about politics, youâre not always getting the same information.â Which, in an already polarized society, might make it even harder to find common ground.
Given existing institutional myopia, and a damning ignorance by policymakers, a complete lack of media coverage, and even the inability of activists, and civil society to comprehend how ad tech’s use is inextricably entwined with what they’ve flagged as concerns around influence operations eroding social cohesion, it’s unclear how meaningful remedial measures can be undertaken around this technology, and the ab/uses its rapacious data collection permits, which is also evolving at pace.
What’s clear is that everyone in New Zealand is at risk, and a clear, present, and growing threat to democracy is going unnoticed by policymakers, and the public.
Sanjana Hattotuwa 