LAS VEGAS — Facebook on Monday took a step into preventive medicine, rolling out a new tool to encourage users to get flu shots as well as appropriate cancer screenings and heart health tests. But the success of the new product may depend on whether the social media giant can regain consumers’ trust.
The company is asking people to use its site to make and record decisions about their health care — such as logging completion of a cholesterol test — at a time when it is trying to contain the fallout from months of controversy around privacy, sharing of user data, and misinformation.
Facebook said it’s put up strict safeguards to protect the privacy of people who use the new tool. The company vowed not to share the data generated through the tool with third parties. It won’t let other users on Facebook see when people use the feature. Nor will it allow advertisers to target ads to users based on the information they share using the tool — though they might see targeted ads if they click through to another website or navigate away to like the page of a health care organization. Within Facebook, the data from the tool will be accessible only to a subset of employees focused on keeping the feature functional.
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