Jeffrey Koncius Appointed to Executive Committee for Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation

Jeffrey A. Koncius of Kiesel Law LLP has been appointed to the three-member Executive Committee in the Meta Pixel Healthcare litigation. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of all patients whose information was allegedly intercepted and transmitted to Meta without their consent when those patients were engaged in what they thought were secure communications with their medical providers.

Expert research showed that at least 664 hospital systems or medical provider web properties sent such HIPAA-protected data to Meta via the Facebook Pixel, which is an invisible piece of code that was placed on the medical websites

More Information About the Facebook Class Action Lawsuit

In June of 2022, an anonymous patient of Baltimore’s MedStar Health System filed a class action lawsuit against Meta, owner of the ubiquitous social media app Facebook

The Facebook class action lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s Pixel tracking tool has been collecting sensitive patient data through hospital websites. This data includes such identifiable information as IP addresses, doctor names, Internet activity, and more. Patients using hospital websites with the Pixel tracking tool would not have consented to this data collection, which is in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Prior to the Meta Pixel lawsuit’s filing, independent newsroom The Markup published a story revealing its own findings. The Markup found that Pixel harvested data from the websites of roughly one-third of the hospitals named by Newsweek as being the top 100 hospitals in the US. 

In most of these cases, when Markup investigators tried to schedule an appointment, Pixel automatically sent this information to Meta, including details of the specific search terms investigators used to find the hospital websites. Pixel was also found within password-protected areas of the web portals.

This report supports the plaintiff’s claim, with expert researchers identifying at least 664 hospitals and provider websites where Pixel was used to transmit sensitive patient data to Meta. The Meta Pixel lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, constitutional invasion of privacy, violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, among other violations.