InfoTrust, a Blue Ash-based digital marketing company, has looked below the surface of the online marketplace and found a veritable marketer's buffet of personal data.

Advertisement Consumer groups warn of personal info tracking on gov't health care site Third-party marketers may see personal info Share Shares Copy Link Copy

You might be signing up for more than you realize when you log onto Healthcare.gov to beat next Monday's Affordable Care Act deadline.Third-party tracking by marketing companies is apparently more prevalent than a lot of folks have realized.Watch this storyInfoTrust, a Blue Ash-based digital marketing company, has looked below the surface of the online marketplace and found a veritable marketer's buffet of personal data."It's like the Wild West," InfoTrust co-founder Alex Yastrebenetsky said. "A lot of organizations are leaking data left and right and consumers don't know what's going on with the data."When consumers log onto Healthcare.gov, they must agree to certain, specified privacy policies.Those policies permit the government website to track basic information. It's a process called tagging.What ACA visitors are not necessarily aware of is that third-party taggers are on the site to gather more personal information that can be used for marketing purposes by private companies.InfoTrust digital marketing analyst Andy Gibson showed WLWT News 5 the tags that loaded onto Healthcare.gov and how some marketing tools were piggybacking off other tags to glean information.Gibson said information like the user’s gender, age, marital status and whether one rents or owns their home can be saved.But he took care to point out that he's not suggesting any illegality or illicit purpose to the tagging, only the absence of transparency."If I'm visiting ESPN.com, I'm pretty comfortable knowing that I'm on ESPN.com and I might be searching for sports information,” Gibson said. “If I'm sharing some sensitive information on Healthcare.gov about pre-existing conditions and that sort of stuff, I'm a little bit more hesitant to have third-party companies collect information on me."The disclosure comes a week before the sign up deadline.The government projects 6 million people will have complied by the deadline."February has been really busy," Interact For Health representative Kate Keller said.And interest is growing.The government is expecting high traffic this weekend, so the site could be slower.There are some people who will be allowed to carry the sign up process into April.The deadline is hard and fast for those who haven't started the process. The government is encouraging people to set up an account on Healthcare.gov to get started this week."If you got your eligibility determination process finished then you have more time past March 31 to go through the plans and pick a plan," Keller said.It is unclear if Healthcare.gov is aware of the marketing tags loaded on its site.WLWT News 5 contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to inquire about it."The privacy and security of consumers' personal information are a top priority for us. When consumers fill out their online Marketplace applications, they can trust that the information that they are providing is protected by stringent security standards,” a spokesman said Monday."Healthcare.gov never collects information for commercial marketing or any purpose unrelated to our mission and goals," Director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Aaron Albright said.But as Gibson perused the government's site this morning, he noted a particular tag and said, "I'm not really sure what that tag is, but it's loading six other tags on the site."Yastrebenetsky said there was no easy way for the average, non-technical consumer to block data collection."We did not find anything malicious on the website," Yastrebenetsky said. "But we feel that visitors need to know. It has to be transparent."