Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
The Australian Privacy Commissioner has found, in two separate determinations, that health-service providers Medmate Australia and Monash IVF interfered with the privacy of individuals whose sensitive information was collected through third-party tracking pixels. The determinations, published on 24 June 2026, conclude a year-long investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) into how the two providers—offering telehealth and fertility services respectively—collected sensitive information on their websites.
The decision establishes that using tracking pixels to track visitors to health-related websites, and then to target them with advertising on social-media platforms, amounts to a collection of sensitive information for which the website provider must obtain consent under the Privacy Act 1988. The Commissioner pointed to community-attitudes research indicating that nine in ten Australians consider it neither fair nor reasonable to be targeted on the basis of their sensitive health data, and emphasized that providers must obtain consent where pixels are used to collect sensitive information such as data on health, political opinions, race, or ethnicity.
Click here to read the OAIC’s announcement.
