The article is about these Telehealth companies sharing intimate data with big tech, but of interest is how many of these companies exist. And their whole purpose is to get you pharma products. The white coats will kill you so its good to avoid them, but this is big pharma bypassing traditional medicine to hock you their dangerous drugs as quickly and easily as possible. If you would like to protect yourself from these trackers mentioned in the article, you can install uMatrix and uBlock Origin and/or run a Pi-Hole DNS server that can filter a lot of tracking and telemetry sites or webpage elements.
Rather than providing care themselves, telehealth companies often act as middlemen connecting patients to affiliated providers covered by HIPAA. As a result, information collected during a telehealth company’s intake may not be protected by HIPAA, while the same information given to the provider would be.
“All the privacy risks are there, with the mistaken but entirely reasonable illusion of security,” said Matthew McCoy, a medical ethics and health policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s a really dangerous combination of things to force the average consumer to deal with.”
A Boom Industry on the Edge of the Law
Together, the companies in this analysis reflect an increasingly competitive—and lucrative—direct-to-consumer health care market. The promise of a streamlined, private prescription process has helped telehealth startups raise billions as they seek to capitalize on a pandemic-driven boom in virtual care.
Hims & Hers, one of the largest players in the space, is now a publicly traded company valued at more than $1 billion; competitor Ro has raised $1 billion since its founding in 2017, with investors valuing the company at $7 billion. Thirty Madison, which operates several telehealth companies focused on different medical needs, is valued at more than $1 billion.
“It’s a pure monetization play,” said Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. “And yes, everybody else is doing it, it’s the way the internet works.… But I think that it’s out of step with medical ethics, clearly.”