According to the WHO, 25% of the European population suffer from depression or anxiety each year and depression accounts for up to 50% of chronic sick leaves. This means that every day, millions of people are looking for information about depression online - whether they are seeking help, support or trying to understand how best to support friends and family. At the same time, the current Internet business model heavily relies on targeted advertisement to generate money, tracking people around the web and syphoning their personal data to build accurate profile for the sole (official) purpose of showing you "better ads". See where all of this might go wrong?
Considering the sensitive aspect of the mental health-related websites it would seem reasonable to expect that the number and nature of the third parties they include is limited to the viable minimum. Unfortunately, Privacy International's research proved that to be quite wrong.
Based on an analysis of 136 popular depression-related websites in France, Germany, and the UK, we observed that a vast majority of these websites embed an impressive number of trackers, mostly for marketing purposes. You might hope that these trackers are at least enabling non-targeted advertisement, yet more than a quarter of the webpages scanned embed third parties who engage in programmatic advertising and Real Time Bidding (RTB). More concerning even, a small subset of these websites offer depression tests that share your answers and results directly or indirectly with third parties.
In this talk, we will highlight what type of third parties can be found on mental health-related websites, how frequently some trackers can be found, and what type of tracking they enable. We will then take you on a journey to see exactly what data is being shared with some of these third parties when you take a depression test, from RTB pre-bid requests to the answers you give.