By Kevin Counihan
The third year of Open Enrollment
is just around the corner. Starting November 1, you’ll be able to enroll or
re-enroll in quality and affordable coverage at HealthCare.gov. Over the last
several months, we’ve been working hard to make the consumer experience even
better this year – learning about what information you need to make decisions
and how to improve the help and support we provide throughout the enrollment
process. An important part of that is continuing to protect your privacy when
you’re shopping for health coverage.
We’re committed to providing you
with the opportunity to personalize your experience. Here are a few of
the updates you can expect from HealthCare.gov. Today, we launched a simple way
to give you more control over the information you choose to share with us – a
new privacy manager. We’re also supporting the Do Not Track browser setting for
our digital advertising. And, you can check out our updated privacy
notice to learn more about these tools and to understand the steps we’ve
taken to protect your privacy. We tried to make the policy easy to navigate
while also being a lot more specific.
We know privacy is important to you
when you use the web. In the process of signing up for health care coverage,
you may provide us with personal information. For instance, you may enter your
email address so that you can stay up to date with announcements and alerts
from HealthCare.gov and learn about your affordable health coverage
options. When you sign up for health care coverage, you provide
information such as your name, Social Security number, and income so that we
can verify your eligibility to purchase coverage. We take protecting this type
of personal information very seriously and only use it to help you get – and
keep – your coverage.
Like all other websites, we receive
some information automatically when you read, browse, or download information
from HealthCare.gov. This is information that your web browser sends when you
browse the internet – such as your domain, IP address, type of device, and date
and time you visited. We use this information to better understand how the site
is being used – and to learn about how we can make it more helpful.
We also employ commonly used web
tools like Google Analytics to analyze HealthCare.gov’s technical performance,
as well as to facilitate, enhance, and measure the effectiveness of our digital
advertising outreach efforts. These tools can help us do things like understand
which pages on our website need improvement, to increase the speed and
functionality of HealthCare.gov and make the site more useful to consumers. You
can learn more about each of the third-party tools currently in use by
reviewing our privacy
notice.
There’s one tool, our new privacy
manager, which we want to make sure you know about. This simple tool
makes it easy for you to opt-in or out of the different types of third-party
tools used by HealthCare.gov – Advertising, Analytics, or Social Media. If you
choose to opt-out, you’ll still have access to everything on the site, but we
won’t use information from your visit to analyze the site’s technical
performance or use digital advertising to remind you about helpful information
like deadlines. You can check out the privacy manager now by clicking on
“Privacy Settings” at the bottom of HealthCare.gov.
In addition, if you have Do Not
Track enabled in your browser, we’ll automatically observe your preferences
related to digital advertising from HealthCare.gov.
The internet is constantly
changing, and we have an obligation to keep evolving alongside it. We’ll keep
reevaluating our own privacy notice, the tools we use, and how they intersect
with the evolving landscape of privacy on the web. We are committed to
protecting the information you entrust with us at HealthCare.gov.
We wish you a great shopping
experience this year.
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