HEALTHCARE & SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook spied on users that relayed private health information on the websites of major cancer institutes and harvested the data to generate advertising profits, users claim in a new class action.
     Lead plaintiff Winston Smith sued Facebook, the American Cancer Society, the American Society of Oncology and five other cancer institutes in Federal Court on Wednesday.
     Websites for the medical institutes feature a secret "Facebook code" that "commandeers" users' web browsers and sends private information to the social media giant, Smith claims in his 92-page complaint.
     "This lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an email Wednesday afternoon.
     Smith says Facebook uses the private health data it obtains to create marketing profiles for each user, and then targets them with tailored advertisements based on their private information.
     When Smith searched for information on lung cancer at the American Cancer Society's website cancer.org, the information he sought and links he clicked were sent to Facebook without his knowledge or consent, he says.
     The lawsuit cites a chart Facebook uses to sell advertising services, which places more than 225 million users in 154 separate medical categories for direct marketing purposes.
     "Facebook's application for advertisers touts its ability to target users based on information Facebook has collected about them relating to health care," the complaint states.
     Facebook's medical-categories list identifies users associated with a wide range of medical conditions, including diabetes, pregnancy, addiction, hepatitis C, HPV, erectile dysfunction, herpes simplex virus and HIV/AIDS.
     Smith says the American Cancer Society and other institutes named in the lawsuit should have disclosed their relationships with Facebook or informed users that their private health information would be shared with the social media titan.
     An American Cancer Society spokeswoman declined to comment on the pending litigation.
     The complaint cites 10 causes of action against Facebook and the seven cancer institutes, claiming they failed to safeguard plaintiffs' private health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Wiretap Act and other state and federal laws.

ABSTRACTBackground: Twitter is an interactive, real-time media that could prove useful in health care. Tweets from cancer patients could offer insight into the needs of cancer patients.

Objective: The objective of this study was to understand cancer patients’ social media usage and gain insight into patient needs.

Methods: A search was conducted of every publicly available user profile on Twitter in Japan for references to the following: breast cancer, leukemia, colon cancer, rectal cancer, colorectal cancer, uterine cancer, cervical cancer, stomach cancer, lung cancer, and ovarian cancer. We then used an application programming interface and a data mining method to conduct a detailed analysis of the tweets from cancer patients.

Results: Twitter user profiles included references to breast cancer (n=313), leukemia (n=158), uterine or cervical cancer (n=134), lung cancer (n=87), colon cancer (n=64), and stomach cancer (n=44). A co-occurrence network is seen for all of these cancers, and each cancer has a unique network conformation. Keywords included words about diagnosis, symptoms, and treatments for almost all cancers. Words related to social activities were extracted for breast cancer. Words related to vaccination and support from public insurance were extracted for uterine or cervical cancer.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates that cancer patients share information about their underlying disease, including diagnosis, symptoms, and treatments, via Twitter. This information could prove useful to health care providers.

Health JAM: Health Care Social Media Review, 10th Edition: Social Media and Chronic Disease

The tenth edition of Health Care Social Media Review.  This week’s theme is the role of social media in addressing, managing and preventing chronic diseases.   According to the World Health Organization (WHO), chronic diseases, also known as noncommunicable diseases (NCD), are a leading cause of death worldwide.  NCDs encompass four main groups: cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disorders and diabetes; these diseases can affect people of any age and socioeconomic group.  As Kenneth Thorpe observed on HealthWorks Collective, “the key to addressing our greatest 21st century health care challenges—controlling costs while achieving improved health outcomes—lies in attacking chronic disease.”