The tool, announced in October, provides users with suggestions to schedule preventive care such as flu shots, cancer screenings and more, as well as tools to locate nearby medical facilities offering those procedures and appointment reminders once scheduled.
Though the tool only requires users’ age and gender, and though Facebook claims the data collected is never sold to or shared with third parties, Atlantic technology writer Sidney Fussell predicted that the tool will be highly valuable to the social media platform as users’ become increasingly reliant on its new, more convenient way to access healthcare.
“Historically, this appears to be Facebook’s operating strategy: Move into a largely unregulated space, leverage the platform’s unmatched ubiquity to create a highly convenient product within that space, and then turn convenience into dependence into more time spent on the platform,” Mr. Fussell wrote.
Essentially, while technology companies’ health-related offerings such as Facebook’s Preventive Health feature increase convenience and improve access to healthcare, they also establish a precedent of sharing increasingly more personal data with those companies, whose healthcare ventures are not bound by HIPAA, the Hippocratic Oath or other regulations. Over time, Mr. Fussell posited, as Facebook and its peers make it easier to access care, consumers are likely to become more willing to overlook issues of data privacy, even as those issues persist.
Read more here.
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