Covered California is a health insurance marketplace. It is not an Insurance Carrier or an Insurance Clearing house. Perhaps they're guilty of something else?
https://calmatters.org/health/2025/05/covered-california-lin...
However, California has its own more general privacy law about using medical information for marketing purposes.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen across government and private sectors: infrastructure designed for care is being exploited for behavioral targeting through advertising motions. The public doesn’t expect their health decisions to be fed into social ad networks, but the platforms already assume ownership of that data trail.
And of course, it’s all connected. The same companies monetizing behavioral profiling at scale are now running the most powerful generative AI systems. Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is also the key infrastructure partner of OpenAI. Meta's ad tools were present on these health sites too. Google’s trackers are everywhere else.
When you strip away the techno-mystique, what’s driving the AI and data arms race isn’t wisdom. It’s ego, power consolidation, and a pathological fear of being second.
And Sam Altman? He’s not stupid. But brilliance without wisdom is just charisma in a predator suit. Why do you think all these services tie directly into AI?
The idea that they only got there by doing a bit of hard honest work is brutally naive. Its a sad fact of life, but fact it is. Looking at world with such optics, there are hardly any surprises (and no its not all doom and gloom, rather just factual reality with very few disappointments down the line).
Have you seen any history at all? This has never worked.
Cohesive, trusting societies get much further than ones that are at war with themselves. Even so, cohesion and trust are nice-to-haves.
Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
When the working class unionizes or vote for more rights, this isn't warfare - as long as it's fair-minded and pragmatic rather than idealogical. The same goes for the rich.
Regarding people with other backgrounds and interests as evil sociopaths / socialists is where the problem comes in.
When those interests come at the expense/lives of other people, it is [1] [2].
> I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
Correct, their theatrics are even dumber than that [3].
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[1] "House Republicans Push Forward Plan to Cut Taxes, Medicaid and Food Aid" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/congress-tax-...
[2] "Sanders on GOP Medicaid cuts: ‘Thousands and thousands of low-income and working people will die’" - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5302085-bernie-sanders-r...
[3] "Musk waves a chainsaw and charms conservatives talking up Trump’s cost-cutting efforts" - https://apnews.com/article/musk-chainsaw-trump-doge-6568e9e0...
Every single time during the leaps of technology that brought tech progress and GDP growth there needed to be some kind of workers' revolt or the threat of it to actualise poors living better lives. Every leap in progress of systemic quality of life for workers came through class war: revolts, general strikes, mass protest, organized labour, etc.
Why do you think now it's different?
The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...
Wikipedia has articles on the larger actions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_stri...
The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
The class struggle is a perspective. It points to how blind rich people are to social issues, and how blind the poor are to economic issues. These two need the struggle, gently. Without it, there is either bloody revolution or cruel autocracy.
That's as simple as it gets. Many people get it wrong.
There is a struggle between those who have power and those who don't. This displacement creates blind spots, and also vantage points.
I don't think AI would come up with this line
You can email the mods if it's something that can be moderated, but please keep it private! It makes things worse if this kind of accusation happens to be wrong. (Also makes things worse if it's right). Often it's singling out an actual, real person for unpleasant scrutiny they didn't expect or want.
"Remember the human."
They use your information for political warfare.
Of course, new techniques are invented all the time, so that may not cover everything.
Your information then can be freely shared with others but not given to you or give you any way to correct the false information in your record.
For what it's worth, in the United States at least, you have several permanent records that follow you everywhere you go. Your medical records work in a similar way to your former employers. In fact, employer confidentiality to other employers allows them to say almost anything about you and neither has to share it with you and you have no chance to have any kind of fair process to correct it.
Now add all the data brokers and the other bribery kind of situations and the whole system is basically broken and corrupt.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/guidance-materials...
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...
Covered California's privacy policy explicitly says they follow HIPAA and that "Covered California will only share your personal information with government agencies, qualified health plans or contractors which help to fulfill a required Exchange function" and "your personal information is only used by or disclosed to those authorized to receive or view it" and "We will not knowingly disclose your personal information to a third party, except as provided in this Privacy Policy".
Those privacy policy assertions have been in place since at least October 2020, per the Internet Archive wayback machine record. [2]
[1] https://www.coveredca.com/pdfs/privacy/CC_Privacy_Policy.pdf
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201024150356/https://www.cover...
>The Markup found that Covered California had more than 60 trackers on its site. Out of more than 200 of the government sites, the average number of trackers on the sites was three. Covered California had dozens more than any other website we examined.
Why is Covered California such an outlier? Why do they need 60 trackers? It's an independent agency that only deals in health insurance, so they obviously (and horribly) thought it was a good idea to send data about residents' health insurance to a third party.
It's an optional follow-on procedure for the dental surgery procedure I had scheduled for this week.
I'm much more careful than most people about keeping Web search and browsing history private. But there's a chance that last week I browsed some question about the scheduled procedure, from my less-private Web browser, rather than from the Tor Browser that I usually use for anything sensitive that doesn't require identifying myself.
If I didn't make a Web OPSEC oops, it looks like maybe someone effectively gave private medical information to LinkedIn, of all places (an employment-finding service, where employers are supposed to be conscientious of EEOC).
oaththrowaway•2h ago
timfsu•2h ago