April 23, 2025 By Bill Toulas
Blue Shield of California disclosed it suffered a data breach after exposing protected health information of 4.7 million members to Google's analytics and advertisement platforms.
The nonprofit health plan, which serves nearly 6 million members across California, published a data breach notification on its website stating that member data was exposed between April 2021 and January 2024.
Today, the United States Department of Health and Human Services breach portal was updated to state that the leak exposed 4.7 million members' protected health data.
According to the notice, the exposure was caused by a misconfiguration of Google Analytics on certain Blue Shield sites. This resulted in the sensitive data potentially being shared with Google advertising platforms and advertisers.
