Cerebral Admits to Revealing Patient Information to Meta, TikTok, and Google

As per TechCrunch, Cerebral, a telehealth startup specialising in mental health, inadvertently shared sensitive information of over 3.1 million patients with Google, Meta, TikTok, and other third-party advertisers. Cerebral admits to exposing a slew of patient data with the tracking tools it’s been using since October 2019 in a notice posted on the company’s website. 

Patient names, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, IP addresses, insurance information, appointment dates, treatment, and other information are all impacted by the oversight. It is possible that the answers clients provided as part of the mental health self-assessment were exposed on the company’s website and app, which patients can use to schedule therapy appointments and receive prescription medication.

Cerebral claims that this data was gathered through the use of tracking pixels, which are pieces of code that Meta, TikTok, and Google allow developers to embed in their apps and websites. For example, the Meta Pixel can gather information about a user’s activity on a website or app after clicking an ad on the platform, and it can even keep track of the information a user fills out on an online form. While this allows companies like Cerebral to track how users interact with their ads on various platforms and the actions they take as a result, it also gives Meta, TikTok, and Google access to this data, which they can then use to gain insight into their own users.