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If you following online privacy you know tracking is everywhere, but it& #39;s still important to keep calling out the most egregious examples. Today in JAMA research I did with @AriBFriedman @davegrande and @matthew_s_mccoy shows that 99% of COVID information pages have trackers. 
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The design of the study is fairly straight-forward: we found the top sites Google points you to if you look up COVID information and analyzed them for third-party requests and cookies, traced data back to companies, and broke it down by the type of site (Gov/Academic/Commercial)
How much tracking was there? 99% of sites have tracking when you look up COVID. Commercial sites have 77 third-party requests and 130 cookies on average. Government sites 8 requests, 4 cookies. Academic 14 requests, 10 cookies.
Commercial sites have more because they tend to skew towards news, and as @RDBinns and I showed previously, news sites have the most online tracking. But why do Government and Academic sites have tracking? Well, it& #39;s because Google (and others) provide "free" audience analysis.
Here& #39;s what I found this morning on COVID websites from @HHSGov and @WHO. Each of which have several @google trackers, notably @googleanalytics. Most troubling is @google allows advertising of pharmaceutical products: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/176031?hl=en">https://support.google.com/adspolicy...
Obviously @HHSGov and @WHO aren& #39;t ad-supported, they& #39;re negligent. But what about commercial sites? This is what the COVID pages for @cnn and @webmd look like - an absolute bonanza of third-party tracking. Again, by adtech companies that will target you for pharmaceuticals.
Anne Borden King of @BadScienceWatch
wrote in the NYTimes that @Facebook showed her targeted ads for phony cancer remedies. @Facebook is also on 46% of the COVID sites we looked at: are they properly segregating and protecting that information or playing by their normal rules?
wrote in the NYTimes that @Facebook showed her targeted ads for phony cancer remedies. @Facebook is also on 46% of the COVID sites we looked at: are they properly segregating and protecting that information or playing by their normal rules?
Another company we found is @Oracle who also tracks 46% of sites. No idea why a database company would track COVID sites? Well, it& #39;s because @Oracle has quietly bought up tracking companies for years and consolidated their networks to offer fine-grained targeting.
The saddest part of all this is the privacy problems with COVID mirror the general pattern we& #39;ve seen with the pandemic. People in Europe have governments that protect them, Americans simply don& #39;t. Demand more in November and vote for candidates who& #39;ll stop predatory tracking.
You can find the paper here: https://timlibert.me/pdf/McCoy_et_al-2020-Covid_Web_Tracking.pdf">https://timlibert.me/pdf/McCoy...
Also, thanks @AriBFriedman, @matthew_s_mccoy, and @davegrande from @PennMedicine for bringing me in on the project. And a note to other CS researchers: make friends outside the discipline, don& #39;t be discouraged by a narrow conception of "novelty", there& #39;s a bigger audience!
