With the help of Facebook’s tracking tool, the online pharmacy has been able to share information with the social media giant – completely without the customer’s approval.
For example, Facebook can find out that a customer has added Viagra to their shopping cart, and that the same person has started a consultation for potency problems. Together with information about who the customer is, this can be used to create targeted ads to the same person.
– I’m shocked. This is data that the pharmacies must not share with anyone, says the social democratic EU parliamentarian Paul Tang Echo.
Violates Facebook’s rules
Last year, it was revealed that state-owned Apoteket had disclosed information about up to one million people’s purchases to Facebook. In response to Wednesday’s disclosure, Facebook referred to its rules, which state that advertisers are not allowed to share information about people’s health with them.
In an email to Ekot, Facebook’s owner company Meta also writes that they have a filter to catch if sensitive data is still sent, but that this cannot “catch everything all the time”.