SAN FRANCISCO – Walgreens is accused of sharing patients’ vaccine information with a third party in a class action lawsuit filed last week in California federal court.
Attorneys at Almeida Law Group and Peiffer Wolf Carr filed the suit April 7 in San Francisco, alleging patients’ efforts to obtain vaccinations are sent in real time to Adobe through tracking tools on the Walgreens website.
“The implications of this practice are significant: if patients cannot trust that their interactions with a healthcare provider—particularly when seeking vaccinations or other medical care—will remain confidential, that trust, and the broader healthcare system that depends on it, is undermined,” the lawsuit says.
Walgreens used tracking technologies on its site despite knowing it would reveal information about patients, the suit adds. And that information is not anonymous – it comes with identifiers like Adobe’s Experience Cloud Identity and other data that allows Adobe to associate health-care activity with particular users, it says.
And in turn, Adobe can use that information for user profiles used for analytics, marketing and targeted advertising, the suit says.
“Patients reasonably expect that their interactions with a healthcare provider— particularly when scheduling vaccinations or seeking medical services—will remain confidential,” the complaint says.
“That expectation is reinforced by longstanding norms of medical confidentiality and by federal law, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which strictly regulates the disclosure of individually identifiable health information by covered entities such as Walgreens.”
The suit alleges violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, invasion of privacy, negligence, violations of the Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act and unjust enrichment.
