# Lifestyles & Discussion > Privacy & Data Security >  Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You

## DamianTV

http://science.slashdot.org/story/15...e-tracking-you
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/loo...ting-your-data




> When we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. *But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores*.


(Slashdot article quoted in entirety)

The sicker you are, the more you pay.  Simple as that.

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## angelatc

> The sicker you are, the more you pay.  Simple as that.


Why is that a bad thing?  From the standpoint of issuing credit, the sicker you are, the more likely you are to die, which means an increase in the odds that you will default on your payments.  

From the standpoint that we likely did not consent to the terms, I agree that it is a bad thing.

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## Working Poor

> From the standpoint that we likely did not consent to the terms, I agree that it is a bad thing.


I am glad you agree with that. I look up symptoms all the time that are not my own.. I guess since I don't use credit and pay cash for everything I purchase and do not participate in the medical industrial complex health care I guess I am safe.

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## presence

lol I looked up ovarian cyst the other day for my neighbor.  We'll see how far that gets them.

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## milgram

One way to obfuscate is to search and surf for loads of random nonsense, right?  It would be nice to have a program do that automatically.

Maybe a program to make your internet activity fit the profile of the coolest person on earth?

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## DamianTV

> Why is that a bad thing?  From the standpoint of issuing credit, the sicker you are, the more likely you are to die, which means an increase in the odds that you will default on your payments.  
> 
> From the standpoint that we likely did not consent to the terms, I agree that it is a bad thing.


Its a bad thing because those that are unable to pay to keep themselves healthy to begin with because of how little they bring home will now have even more taken from them.  Financial insecurity leads to food insecurity leads to health insecurity which leads right back to Financial insecurity.  A vicious downward spiral.

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## Zippyjuan

CDC sometimes tracks Google searches to see if people are looking up treatments for things like the flu to try to see when outbreaks are occurring (they track numbers of searches- not individual ones).

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## VIDEODROME

I use a VPN connection to random countries.  Does that alone skew the data if they think I'm from Germany or Japan?

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