Blue Shield Data Breach (Google Ads)

Summary

Blue Shield of California has begun notifying certain members of a potential data breach that may have included elements of their protected health information. Due to the complexity and scope of the disclosures, Blue Shield is unable to confirm whether any particular member’s specific information was affected. Out of an abundance of caution, Blue Shield is providing notice to all members who may have accessed their member information on the potentially impacted Blue Shield websites during the relevant time frame. Blue Shield takes this matter very seriously and has already initiated measures to safeguard against similar future disclosures. What happened Like other health plans, Blue Shield historically used the third-party vendor service, Google Analytics, to internally track website usage of members who entered certain Blue Shield sites. We were doing this to improve the services we provide to our members. On February 11, 2025, Blue Shield discovered that, between April 2021 and January 2024, Google Analytics was configured in a way that allowed certain member data to be shared with Google’s advertising product, Google Ads, that likely included protected health information. Google may have used this data to conduct focused ad campaigns back to those individual members. We want to reassure our members that no bad actor was involved, and, to our knowledge, Google has not used the information for any purpose other than these ads or shared the protected information with anyone. Blue Shield severed the connection between Google Analytics and Google Ads on its websites in January 2024. We have no reason to believe that any member data has been shared from Blue Shield’s websites with Google after the connection was severed. Upon discovering the issue, Blue Shield immediately initiated a review of its websites and security protocols to ensure that no other analytics tracking software is impermissibly sharing members’ protected health information. What information was invol...