Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio.

Hey there and welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, I'm an executive

producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you?

A listener whom I will refer to as R, we did in a request.

The reason I'm not giving the listener's name is that the request has to do with a privacy

breach issue and just to make sure I don't make a, you know, uncomfortable situation

even worse, I'm not going to say their name on here, but I will say thank you are for

your request.

R wanted to know more about what is now called meta pixel, formerly we would call it Facebook

pixel, because some of ours personal data became compromised due to an issue with

novent health, which apparently misconfigured a pixel tracker, which led to the unintentional

sharing of personal patient information with Facebook, which included medical data.

That medical data would include stuff like a type of doctor's appointment someone was

searching for or which position they selected to see that kind of thing.

It didn't automatically know everything about a patient's medical history, it was more

about specific activities having to do with an online tool.

So the pixel was meant to track the use of this tool that novent had already launched

but was really promoting early on during the pandemic.

The tool is called my chart, it's kind of a patient portal tool and novent was trying

to get more patients to be aware of it and to use it to do things like schedule virtual

doctor visits because of course at the time most of us were stuck at home.

So the tracking tool was really intended to give feedback to novent about how its marketing

...