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We found the drug targeted at users who Facebook determined had shown an interest in cancer awareness.
Several drugs were targeted at either Diabetes mellitus awareness or Diabetes mellitus throw in 2 awareness.
Brilinta, from AstraZeneca.
Mayzent and Kesimpta, two other products from Novartis.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease awareness?
Trelegy, another GSK product.
We also found drugs targeted by close proxies for other health conditions.
We also found it targeted at users interested in therapy and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
In at least one case, we found, the interest targeted was barely even a proxy.
The company only places somevery specific limitson how users can target health conditions.
The potential audience size for these ads can be massive.
Other categories are more narrow.
Beyond that, targeting products by surveilling the sick inherently exploits vulnerable users privacy, Ostherr said.
(Facebook denied the allegations, calling the suit an attack on the way the Internet works.)
But the data Facebook does have can be enormously sensitive, as some independent researchers have shown.
Many patients may have looked to Facebook for community and help in the past year of pandemic-enforced isolation.
Their priority really is not being tracked from one website to another, Ostherr said.
Their priority is surviving.
This article by Colin Lecher wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
