Case Study
FTI Technology Provides Advertising Technology Analysis and Review for Large Hospital Group Facing Data Privacy Litigation
One of the largest hospital groups in the U.S. was facing litigation relating to alleged data privacy violations. The organization had been using advertising analytics trackers on its websites to collect information to support digital marketing. Patients sued on the grounds that this was a breach of their privacy rights under various medical information privacy laws and wiretapping laws in California. FTI Technology provided a swift and extensive technical analysis and expert reporting to help the client understand how the ad trackers were used across its sites and whether patient data had been mishandled.
Situation
Litigators and regulatory agencies are increasingly pursuing action against health care organizations for misuse of advertising trackers on websites. In this matter, the client needed to collect and analyze activities across 12 websites connected to hundreds of hospitals within its network in a matter of days. Additionally, it needed to determine what advertising trackers were in place on its bill pay site and patient portals.
The client wanted to immediately turn all ad trackers off to eliminate any additional exposures, which placed intense time pressure on the effort to collect and preserve anything on the websites that could be relevant to the litigation.
All observations about the use of the ad trackers on the sites and the workflows followed during analysis needed to be documented and defensible so they could stand up to scrutiny in court.
Our Role
Experts within FTI Technology’s Information Governance, Privacy & Security practice have firsthand experience deploying, developing and analyzing a wide range of pixel and ad tracking tools for high-stakes litigation, investigations and compliance reviews. The team’s expertise, workflows and technology in responding to these matters made it possible to complete the initial preservation and analysis in only two days. The matter included the following:
- Defined the scope of domains, sites, mobile platforms and trackers that would need to be analyzed for the case. This included performing mock user journeys and scenarios through the sites, while tracking all backend information being captured from the site and transferred to servers during those actions.
- Implemented FTI Technology’s proprietary platform to collect the data from the scoping exercise, categorize the data elements transmitted and document the entities receiving data.
- Analyzed data collected and developed detailed dashboards to demonstrate the scope and scale of advertising trackers used across the network’s sites, how they collected data, what personal information was captured and how data was transferred to third parties.
Our Impact
Within two days, FTI Technology’s experts onboarded the matter, conducted data collection, analyzed the findings and delivered a detailed expert report about the ad tracking activity on the client’s sites.
Swift response allowed the client to turn all ad trackers off within their specified timeframe, supporting efforts to put a stop to potentially noncompliant data collection and sharing activities.
Support for ongoing litigation with additional expert reporting and advising on complex issues.