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Lawyers Are Sending Mobile Ads To Patients Sitting In Emergency Rooms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors' offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients. The potentially creepy part? They're only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room. The technology behind the ads, known as geofencing, or placing a digital perimeter around a specific location, has been deployed by retailers for years to offer coupons and special offers to customers as they shop. Bringing it into health care spaces, however, is raising alarm among privacy experts.
Law firms and marketing companies from Tennessee to California are also testing out the technology in hospital settings. "Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not," Kakis says. "But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room." The advertisers identify someone's location by grabbing what is known as "phone ID" from Wi-Fi, cell data or an app using GPS. Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month -- and on multiple devices.
Law firms and marketing companies from Tennessee to California are also testing out the technology in hospital settings. "Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not," Kakis says. "But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room." The advertisers identify someone's location by grabbing what is known as "phone ID" from Wi-Fi, cell data or an app using GPS. Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month -- and on multiple devices.
They strive to hit new lows and this time they've nearly bottomed out. Some of them truly are ambulance chasers and now they let the ads chase the ambulances for them. Scum of the Earth, crud at the bottom of the barrel, less than human.
Um, I’m pretty sure they could get a whole lot worse. Are they deliberately causing car crashes, sabotaging consumer safety products, or hiring thugs to beat random (rich-seeming) strangers to drum up business yet? Working clandestinely with prosecutors and police to entrap potential clients so they’ll need lawyers? Conspiring to inflate prices or rig cases, taking dives, or betting on cases, especially ones they themselves are involved with? (“I’ll take The People of the State of Missouri versus Rodriguez to acquit in the fourth day of deliberations... it pays 17 to 1, right?”)
This is just advertising. You might as well whine about product placement in television and motion pictures, or say it’s creepy that they have ads for alarm systems and adult diapers on cable news channels, and ads for beer, or cars, or trucks during big football games, rather than the other way around.
As for how they “know,” I don’t think they do. Either the cellphone maker, app author, or cell carrier uses a technique like cellphone triangulation or something to figure you’re in a hospital. Now the hospital has no way of stopping this short of turning hospital buildings into giant faraday cages, illegally broadcasting their own radio signal to interfere with those of cell towers, build their OWN towers (which costs money and gives them no benefit unless maybe THEY inject ads,) and hide users’ locations that way, but they have no incentive to do so. Probably when whoever it is serving the ads detects (either via WiFi or cell triangulation, or GPS or location sharing,) you’re in a hospital, they serve ads from whoever it is who asked them to serve their ads to anyone in that location.
I don’t see what the problem is. Unbeknownst, seemingly, to many whining about their precious privacy, a mobile phone is screaming its ID number, electronically, in radio frequency energy, every second or so, and it must do so for the system to work! To want to take advantage of that convenience, and all the powers conferred upon you by what would have seemed like sorcery only a century ago, and gripe about the unavoidable cost, is hypocrisy. To try to make it off-limits to attempt to advertise ANY services only reduces streams of revenue that help defray the end-costs of your handset and the service without which your fancy little phone is basically a combination MP3 player and compact camera. Without that revenue stream, it would cost even more.
It’s just like free websites and services. Advertising pays for it. Don’t like ads? Don’t use the service. Don’t want people knowing where your phone is? Tell it to stop screaming it’s ID number by shutting off all its transmitters. This can usually be done using something called “airplane mode”. Then it won’t broadcast its radio signal, and no one will know where you are to serve you ads. Have a nice day.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.