A federal judge has sided with a powerful hospital lobby in a legal battle with regulators over their use of third-party website trackers to gather details about visitors’ online behavior.
North Texas U.S. District Court judge Mark Pittman ruled that federal guidance limiting hospital websites’ use of these trackers exceeds the Health and Human Services Department’s authority under HIPAA, according to an opinion filed Thursday.
The American Hospital Association had sued the Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the federal privacy law known as HIPAA, last year shortly after OCR published a bulletin restricting the use of free tracking technologies, including those offered by Google and Meta. The industry association argued that OCR’s attempts to regulate these tools both exceed its authority and could cause harm to hospitals and their online visitors by depriving them of relevant and accurate information, including translation services and digital maps.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Mohana Ravindranath
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.statnews.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.