Nevada vaccine website implants more trackers than any state

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — The Nevada website the public uses to get information on coronavirus vaccines is packed with more ad trackers and third-party cookies than any state vaccination website in the country, allowing companies to track how visitors navigate the internet and collect data on them that can potentially be used or sold by third parties.

Since vaccines became available, health officials have directed people looking for vaccine information — where doses are available and how to schedule appointments, for example — to ImmunizeNevada.org or NVCOVIDFighter.org, which is an address that directs visitors to the same website.

Both state officials and representatives from Immunize Nevada, the nonprofit that runs the website, say the trackers are standard for outreach campaigns and for user experience and to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising efforts.

But digital privacy experts question that explanation. They say the number of trackers on Nevada's site in comparison to other states is alarming and goes beyond data-gathering applicable to outreach. Potentially, experts say, the information can be packaged by brokers that sell data to customers ranging from insurance companies to political campaigns — something the state and creative agency with which it contracts deny.

“The vast majority of these cookies are generating data that would be completely useless to state officials in optimizing their outreach, while putting a lot of our health data in the hands of advertisers,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

An investigation by The Markup published in March found that Nevada's website took longer to load than any state vaccination website in the U.S. The technology publication launched last year...