Scotlands NHS health symptoms checker website is sharing data with Google and Facebook

Scotland’s answer to the NHS 111 Online health symptom checker, NHS Informs, pings Facebook, Google, and other ad-heavy services.

The trackers are related to Google’s Tag Manager, a product that interacts with Google Analytics and the Doubleclick ad network, and Facebook’s controversial user-tracking service, Pixel.

NHS Inform is a website that provides Scots with a series of information about their symptoms and tells them what to do in case of illness, in a similar way to its UK counterpart, NHS 111 Online (formerly NHS Choices).

NHS Inform’s “self-help” pages, a series of multiple-choice questionnaires for symptom-checking, contain elements from Google Doubleclick – the giant’s online ad sales marketplace, Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and a large GIF from UK’s ad agency Avid Media – via its proprietary metadsp.co.uk domain.