Health Context in Audience Names

Ours Privacy blocks audience Export Names that imply a health condition, treatment, or clinical event, because the name is displayed verbatim in the advertising platform's own interface.

Use this page when Ours Privacy refuses to save an Export Name, or when you want to know what the check covers before you write one. The name itself is explained in Export names.

Important: Advertising platforms are not HIPAA business associates and do not sign BAAs. Hashing an email does not make it anonymous. Read Compliance for audiences before sending an audience to any platform.

Why a name is a disclosure

The Export Name is rendered verbatim in the advertising platform's own interface. That makes the name a piece of information the platform receives, separate from the member list.

Consider an audience called diabetes-followup-q3. Every identifier in it is hashed. No condition, no property, and no criteria are sent. And the platform still learns that the people in that list have been grouped by a diabetes-related concern, because the name says so and the membership says who. Hashing does nothing about this: it protects the identifiers, and the name is not an identifier.

Advertising platforms treat this as their problem too. Meta's Business Tools Terms state that the names you choose and criteria you establish for custom audiences must not reflect, imply, or be based on health information. Google's Customer Match policy prohibits lists that contain or imply sensitive information including health conditions. The US Federal Trade Commission has charged companies over exactly this: the GoodRx complaint identified custom audiences named after specific medications and conditions.

So the name is enforced rather than advised. Ours Privacy checks the Export Name against a clinical vocabulary and refuses to save one that carries health context, showing you the term that caused it.

What gets blocked

The vocabulary covers names that identify a condition, a treatment, a medication, or a clinical event. Broadly:

Conditions and diagnoses, including cancer and cancer types, chronic disease, neurological conditions, autoimmune conditions, and infectious disease.
Mental health and substance use conditions and clinical programs.
Reproductive and sexual health conditions and procedures.
Gender-affirming care.
Clinical specialties where the specialty implies the condition.
Procedures, diagnostics, and screenings named for what they detect or treat.
Medications, by generic and brand name.
Disability and genetic conditions.
Clinical context phrases that place someone inside care, such as a treatment plan or a treatment program.

The check normalizes what you type before comparing, so cosmetic variations of a blocked term are caught as well as the plain spelling.

What is deliberately allowed

A blocklist that fires on ordinary marketing names teaches people to ignore it, and after that nobody reads it. So the check is written to leave normal healthcare-marketing vocabulary alone.

Plain health words are fine. health, healthcare, wellness, medical, care, doctor, nurse, fitness, and nutrition are not blocked on their own. A name becomes a disclosure when it names a condition, treatment, or clinical event, so health-newsletter-signup and medical-device-buyers save without complaint.

Words marketing already owns are fine. recovery (cart recovery), referral (referral programs), withdrawal (banking), screening (recruiting), abandoned, conversion, funnel, retention, and churn all stay usable. Where the clinical sense is the one that matters, the qualified phrase is blocked instead of the bare word.

Overloaded words are fine. stress, panic, blind, epic, alcohol, allergy, and prep have a more common non-clinical sense. The clinical variants are blocked instead.

treatment on its own is fine. It is the standard word for an experiment variant, and Ours Privacy ships an experimentation product, so treatment-group-a is a name people legitimately use. The clinical phrases built on it are what get blocked.

Short abbreviations are fine. Two-letter abbreviations are too overloaded to block usefully. Unambiguous longer forms are covered.

One inclusion is knowingly aggressive: stroke, which also means a golf shot and a stroke of genius. Healthcare is the point of the check, so it errs toward blocking there. If it gets in your way, tell support@oursprivacy.com.

When the check stops you

The message names the term it matched. Do not try to reword around it: rewording a descriptive name usually produces a slightly less obvious descriptive name, which is the same disclosure with extra steps.

Instead, move the meaning to the field that keeps it. Put the full description in Name, where it stays inside Ours Privacy and helps your team, and press Generate for the Export Name.

An audience named Post-Discharge Follow-Up, No Appointment Booked internally with an Export Name of copper-lantern-cove gives you everything: your team knows what the audience is, and the platform learns nothing.

What the check does not do

It does not inspect your conditions. You can build an audience on any criteria your data supports. The check is on the destination-facing name only.

It does not decide whether the audience is lawful to share. A name of amber-harbor-drum on an audience of people who visited an oncology page is a compliant name on an audience you may well have no lawful basis to send to an advertising platform. The name check removes one specific disclosure. Everything else is still your call, and the data-sharing terms you accept before syncing say so. See Compliance for audiences.

It does not apply to your internal Name. That field is deliberately unrestricted, because a descriptive internal name is the thing that makes the split work.

Next Steps

Export names for setting and changing the destination-facing name.
Compliance for audiences for the obligations the name check does not cover.
Syncing to destinations for where the name is shown to the platform.
Audience FAQs for questions about naming and blocked terms.

Need help? Contact support@oursprivacy.com.