Comment by vharuck
17 hours ago
When I first read the headline, I thought it was a boneheaded mistake of forgetting to disable tracking on certain web pages. But no:
>The Markup found that Covered California had more than 60 trackers on its site. Out of more than 200 of the government sites, the average number of trackers on the sites was three. Covered California had dozens more than any other website we examined.
Why is Covered California such an outlier? Why do they need 60 trackers? It's an independent agency that only deals in health insurance, so they obviously (and horribly) thought it was a good idea to send data about residents' health insurance to a third party.
I'm sure they did it for money. Those trackers weren't put there for nothing. At least government websites funneling citizen's data to Google by using Google Analytics on their sites can argue that they're just selling out taxpayers to get easy site metrics. When you've got 60 trackers on a single page though, somebody is stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for user data.
I assume some of it was to show targeted ads on social media platforms. I'm sure an internal KPI is new customers, just like any e-commerce site.
Quick reminder that state of California takes a DNA sample from every newborn and sells it to third parties