Dr. Ansay: 10,000 prescriptions for cannabis online, search engines innocent
After prescriptions from a telemedicine provider were online, the provider accused search engine operators of illegally indexing them – wrongly.
(Image: Dr. Ansay)
Itrecently became public that PDF files of prescriptions for cannabis were being circulated online. These were prescribed via the platform of telemedicine provider Dr. Ansay. The latter then accused not only a former employee, but also the search engines: "DuckDuckGo uses the search results from Bing, which crawled and indexed the data from our server without permission". Now it turns out that this is probably not true.
IT security researcher Matthias Marx has discovered a sitemap with all the recipes – an invitation to the crawlers, so to speak. There are also 10,000 recipes listed in the sitemap. It is unclear whether Dr. Ansay explicitly instructed his developers to do this. It is also unclear what the sitemap and robots.txt looked like three days ago.
Although the PDFs can no longer be found, information can still be found via the search engine. "You can still find cached results via the search engine. The URLs of these results can be found in the sitemap," explains Marx.
In addition, a request to the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Thorsten Fuchs, revealed that Ansay had only informed the data protection authority later. Initially, the Hamburg Data Protection Commissioner received numerous complaints from those affected. "The information and the report gave rise to further investigations, so we approached the company with questions," a spokesperson told heise online. Due to the large number of recipes freely available on the Internet, the incident is being taken very seriously.
(mack)
