  This article investigates privacy risks to those visiting health- related web
pages. The population of pages analyzed is derived from the 50 top search
results for 1,986 common diseases. This yielded a total population of 80,124
unique pages which were analyzed for the presence of third-party HTTP requests.
91% of pages were found to make requests to third parties. Investigation of
URIs revealed that 70% of HTTP Referer strings contained information exposing
specific conditions, treatments, and diseases. This presents a risk to users in
the form of personal identification and blind discrimination. An examination of
extant government and corporate policies reveals that users are insufficiently
protected from such risks.
