Last week, a bombshell report revealed that Britain’s most prominent health care system shared private patient data with Facebook through its Meta Pixel tracking tool. And this week, it has been revealed that some of the country’s biggest mental health charities have been sharing sensitive information with the social media giant in the same way.

The data sent to Facebook included information on what pages users accessed, including one targeted at children offering advice on suicidal thoughts. Most of these charities have now removed the Meta Pixel tool, and Facebook says that it has a “filtering system” in place to make sure it doesn’t receive any sensitive info sent to it.

“Organizations should not send sensitive information about people through our business tools, doing so is against our policies,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We educate advertisers on properly setting up business tools to prevent this from occurring and our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”

However, Facebook also went on to note that this filtering system “doesn’t catch everything.” No matter what these processes are, it’s fair to question why Facebook is receiving so much private health data in the first place and whether serious steps should be taken to stop this practice.

Recommended Resources

Choose what the experts use: award-winning cybersecurity you can trust and rely on.

Surf the web truly incognito. Try Bitdefender Premium VPN, the ultra-fast VPN that keeps your online identity and activities safe from hackers, ISPs and snoops.

System Mechanic 14 – Make your computer run like new. Winner of 200+ Editor’s Choice awards!