Blue Shield Data Breach (Google Ads)

https://news.blueshieldca.com/notice-of-data-breach

by bix6 • 1 year ago

71 47 1 year ago

news.blueshieldca.com

bix6• 1 year ago

Disappointing behavior to say the least.

"On February 11, 2025, Blue Shield discovered that, between April 2021 and January 2024, Google Analytics was configured in a way that allowed certain member data to be shared with Google’s advertising product, Google Ads, that likely included protected health information. Google may have used this data to conduct focused ad campaigns back to those individual members. We want to reassure our members that no bad actor was involved, and, to our knowledge, Google has not used the information for any purpose other than these ads or shared the protected information with anyone."

accrual• 1 year ago

I wonder what, if any, HIPAA fines will apply to Blue Shield if they're found to have inadvertently exposed PHI.

https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-violation-fines/

chimeracoder2• 1 year ago

I wonder what, if any, HIPAA fines will apply to Blue Shield if they're found to have inadvertently exposed PHI.

Well, they have inadvertently exposed PHI - this press release literally admits that they did.

In terms of what fines will apply, well, the annual cap for violations is about $2 million per calendar year, but I doubt they'll have to pay even that.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

"No bad actor was involved"

I see two but whatever

anon84873628• 1 year ago

I'm sure Google doesn't want customers doing this dumb stuff. So I'd also expect by this point they would be automatically profiling the incoming data to throw up warnings and safe guards. Maybe there is a perverse incentive where doing that only increases their liability in these situations.

wrs2• 1 year ago

Putting a third party analytics tool on a page containing PHI is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. It’s really surprising the developers could get that through a security review.

donohoe• 1 year ago

What security review?

stackskipton• 1 year ago

As someone who has worked in this field, I'm not. Marketing is generally exempt from massive legal review as they hand wave away "We don't deal with HIPPA data" and developers just wanting marketing to go away, dropped the Javascript block into files that were used for a ton of products including HIPAA containing ones.

EDIT: Most of these places are just feature factories with offshore developers who are very unlikely to raise concerns.

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

I would turn that around to be an inference that there was no effective security review....

AlotOfReading• 1 year ago

Kaiser was hit with a class action for exactly the same issue last year: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/patients-advance-ka...

GoodRx, BetterHelp, and dozens of others have received notices that this is an issue. The federal OCR even published a bulletin about this 3 years ago.

You'd think that any one of these would have triggered internal reviews and discovered this issue for all the others, but that's much too high a bar to expect in healthcare.

ajross• 1 year ago

It's only surprising when you phrase it like that. Real bugs are interactions. I mean, sure, if you're asked to review a pull request like "patient_info: Use google to track MRI data", it's a no brainer.

But no doubt the analytics blurb was stuffed into a generic "top_level_page" generator or whatever. And it happens that the PHI wasn't firewalled by design, and pulled it in by default. Or it was firewalled, but then someone forgot and migrated the "patient_info_page" templates to a generic framework, etc...

Security is really, really hard. And one of the worst responses to a mistake like this is to tut-tut about how obvious a mistake and how easy to avoid it was. Believing that secure software is a matter of "not making mistakes" makes you more likely to write such bugs and not less, because you won't take the time to establish clear boundaries from the start.

nyarlathotep_• 1 year ago

that no bad actor was involved

Actually no, Blue Shield is the bad actor here.

Why, again, is this necessary at all? What is the rationale for analytics somewhere that deals with private health data?

olyjohn• 1 year ago

Are you fucking kidding me? You get interrupted reading this shit by a pop up asking you for your information?

userbinator3• 1 year ago

I guess that's what they mean by the "This site requires Javascript in order to function properly" banner I get at the top. The article is readable without JS anyway.

Ancapistani• 1 year ago

The email subject for this notification was "Blue Shield of California Privacy Notification."

It sounds like a fairly minor concern, but I find it quite distasteful that the email subject doesn't indicate that a breach occurred.

knowitnone2• 1 year ago

the hope is people delete it because it's just a "privacy notification"

kmeisthax• 1 year ago

Related pet peeve: if the price of something goes down, it's a price drop, but when it goes up, it's a price change.

Can we coin a term for this weasel-y headline writing?

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

There should be legal penalties for companies whose negligence leads to data breaches. Consumers really have no recourse here and even CCPA and HIPAA fines are exceedingly rare.

wormius3• 1 year ago

I'm sure those affected will get a 3.00 check and the lawyers bringing suit will make a chunk of change. (curious if this will lead to a suit or what the laws are around that (e.g. can this be class action or will only known affected individuals be allowed to seek redress?)

neilv2• 1 year ago

between April 2021 and January 2024, Google Analytics was configured in a way that allowed certain member data to be shared with Google’s advertising product, Google Ads, that likely included protected health information.

I see so many medical and government sites that really shouldn't be running third-party trackers. Yet almost every single time I check, they are.

It's negligence/incompetence/reckless, criminally so, in some cases.

Given the inability of almost anyone in our field to build or operate a competently secure system, and the practices that go out of their way to gratuitously make the situation even worse-- we really just need to smack our entire field upside the head, repeatedly, until we stop churning out shit while strutting about how smart we are.

"AI" development tools (i.e., making humans stupider, through the power of plagiarism, to churn more BS at a faster rate) isn't going to solve the root problems of grossly misaligned incentives and culture.

wormius3• 1 year ago

Gotta love the passive voice used, too.

stogot• 1 year ago

How do we report this?

XCSme2• 1 year ago

I was initially surprised to see several customers from .gov or medical corporations using my self-hosted analytics platform (I never considered those customer types before), but it makes a lot of sense. I think many of them actually run the platforms locally, and I think all companies that deal with private data (e.g. medical, banks, insurance) should be legally forced to not send any data to third parties, unless the customers explicitly agree to that (or the law forces them to do so).

neilv2• 1 year ago

We understand receiving a notice such as this can create concern, and we regret that member personal information may have been shared without authorization.

Vague passive voice, FTW.

One way to start to fix the pattern and practice of gross negligence in our field is for Blue Shield CA to get stuck with HIPAA violation fines for each record leaked.

If Blue Shield CA claims they're not competent to know which records were leaked, assume it's all of the records.

ceejayoz• 1 year ago

I've seen this sort of wording called "exonerative tense" when describing police conduct.

phkahler• 1 year ago

This isn't a "data breach" is it? Blue Shield shared data with GA that they were not supposed to right?

lmkg• 1 year ago

It depends on the jurisdiction and law, but a "data breach" is when data is accessed by a party who is not authorized, or who should not be authorized. It's not just hackers. Sending data to the wrong recipient is a form of data breach. Under some definitions, sending data to the intended recipient without appropriate safeguard is a form of data breach.

In this case, health care data covered by HIPAA was sent to a party without a legal contract that extends HIPAA to the receiving party. By law, that's a data breach.

Under some legal definitions, "data breach" includes not just breakdowns of confidentiality, but also of availability and/or integrity. So a company deleting your data by accident would be considered a data breach, even though it's being accessed by fewer parties than intended. This can be important: imagine a bank or credit agency losing some or all of the data about you, this would materially impact your ability to do business in the modern world.

paxys• 1 year ago

Well it is a data breach. Self inflicted, sure, but still a breach.

Animats3• 1 year ago

"Blue Shield severed the connection between Google Analytics and Google Ads on its websites in January 2024."

They're lying.

Look at the page source for the announcement of the data breach. Use of both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

     <!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
      <script type="text/javascript" src="/static/js/jquery.cookie.js"></script>
      <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-KTK4E56VDB"></script>
      <script>

...

      <script>
  
        (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
            (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
            m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
        })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

        var check_site_id = 347;

        var social_patterns = 
        ['facebook.com/share','twitter.com/share','linkedin.com/share',
        'pinterest.com/share','mailto:?subject'];

...

gundmc• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure you can use Google analytics without sending the data to Google Ads? I'm not sure why they would lie about correcting the issue.

darknavi• 1 year ago

Their News subdomain stack might be completely different than their patient portals.

kube-system• 1 year ago

They almost certainly are entirely different tech stacks, and likely not even developed by the same organizations. If you poke around in the source a bit you can find clear evidence that the news site is probably developed by a third party PR firm, who wouldn't typically have anything to do with a patient portal.

Animats3• 1 year ago

Saved copy of page, in case it is changed: https://archive.is/GB8Ty

wormius3• 1 year ago

Went to look at my provider's service portal to see if there was any google analytics. Nothing showed when searching google, but...

"...Settings.WebAnalyticsEnabled = 'False';"

is set - thank goodness my medical provider's doing it right. (at least on this portion, I'm not digging through all the code or whatever)

userbinator3• 1 year ago

This is a good reminder to add these to your HOSTS file if you don't already have them blocked (which I have done for over 2 decades now):

    0.0.0.0 analytics.google.com
    0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 www.googletagservices.com

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

You’ve unlocked a memory:

Back in the day I ran a giant hosts file for the same reason. I guess dumb OSs didn’t index HOSTS files well (didn’t expect them to be very large?) and it slowed things down noticeably.

Apparently it’s still a thing and the workaround doesn’t work either:

This is still relevant with Windows 11; adding a 20MB hosts file (to block every known malicious IP) makes a 24-core i7 /w nvme take 4+ hours to boot. Worse, DNS cache is now system-controlled and cannot be stopped. Do not attempt!

https://serverfault.com/questions/322747/can-a-long-etc-host...

userbinator3• 1 year ago

That sounds like the result of an "accidentally quadratic" or worse algorithm. Interesting that they didn't bother to fix it after all these years; perhaps they knew what those with large HOSTS files were using them for, and (especially now with Win11) were against it.

SapporoChris• 1 year ago

I have 133 occurrences of google in my host file.(and I'm not even saying that's enough) Those five you listed are a good start, but you can do better. There are a lot of services available to update your host file.

NelsonMinar• 1 year ago

I block ads and trackers in my browser. But I had that turned off for Blue Shield's website because it is very broken in lots of ways. One way it's broken is it fails if you run an ad blocker. Not sure if blocking Google's surveillance is the problem or some other ad blocker rule.

XCSme2• 1 year ago

This can happen to anyone, and not only that, once you decide to send data to thrid-parties, you no longer have control of this data, and those third-parties themselves might accidentally leak the data. Who would then be to blame if you sent the data to someone that didn't respect the privacy regulations? Because the customer only had a contract directly with you, and only shared data with your company.

Offtopic: I wrote a TLDR of this incident here: https://www.uxwizz.com/blog/blue-shield-data-breach-why-self...

Blue Shield Data Breach (Google Ads)

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