Tracking pixels and health websites: what patients should know

Advertising pixels report page visits back to ad platforms. On a store's website, that's marketing. On a health website, the page someone reads can itself say something sensitive about them.

What a tracking pixel is

A tracking pixel is a tiny piece of code, usually invisible, that a website loads from an advertising or analytics company. When the page loads, the pixel tells that company someone visited, along with details like the page address, the device and sometimes an identifier that links the visit to an ad account.

On a shoe store's site, that lets the store show you the same shoes again later, everywhere you go. Mildly annoying, mostly harmless.

Why health pages are different

On a health website, the page address itself can be revealing. A visit to a page about a specific condition, a counseling service or a pregnancy topic can say something deeply personal. Pair that with an identifier from an ad platform and the visit is no longer anonymous browsing. It's a sensitive detail about a person, sent to a company that has no business knowing it.

Regulators have taken notice, and so have patients. Many people would be surprised to learn that reading a health page could follow them into their ad feed.

What this site does instead

This site installs no ad trackers by default, and analytics only run if the practice turns them on. Even then, the approach is deliberately restrained:

• No advertising pixels on patient-facing pages
• No third-party scripts that collect identifiers for ad targeting
• Analytics that count visits rather than build profiles of visitors
• Nothing extra loads until the practice decides it should

The result is a site that can still tell the practice which pages are useful, without telling anyone else which pages you read.

Questions worth asking

If you're curious about a health website you use, a few questions help. Does its privacy policy mention tracking or advertising partners? Does it let you decline cookies? Does it advertise heavily, and if so, how does it measure those ads? None of these answers prove a problem on their own, but together they show how much thought went into it.

For practices, the safer path is simple: start with nothing and add only what you can justify, page by page.

Loam & Key is a fictional practice with no patients, so it has nothing to track. Its website still behaves as if it did, because that's the version worth showing.

General information from a fictional practice; not legal or medical advice.