[fnordpiglet]

I would assume that a more likely scenario (although yours is also likely!) is someone with cancer will almost certainly search the internet at some point for information about cancer and their treatments. This will immediately be sucked up by the pervasive surveillance economy and used to extract the maximum amount of marginal revenue attainable through any means necessary. You don’t need to know they’re in a doctors waiting room, using the internet for information retrieval will specifically inform everyone interested in paying for it what you are searching for.

[freedomben]

Yes, I agree. It's also quite likely that people who know people with cancer will search about cancer, and sadly some of them will later need to purchase cremation services. This means that statistically it's not a bad idea to target people who have searched for cancer with cremations. This seems like the most likely explanation to me.

(Edit to add a meta note: Apparently this has to be said on Hacker News because people can't distinguish between someone presenting facts and someone making a defense, but I'm not defending the practice. I think it's abhorrent. But if we can't dispassionately analyze reality to try and understand the motivations, then we've really abandoned reason and lost our way).

[adrr]

All the medical information sites(WebMD,Drugs.com) are filled with ad beacons.

[davidfischer]

Ya, other types of retargeting like this are also likely. The jump from visiting a website to an advertiser does physical mailings isn't a big one (political advertising uses this a lot). Long story short, she was probably retargeted based on her actions and probably not based on the insurer or provider doing anything illegal.

Edit: I don't want to sound like I'm blaming the victim here. That's not my intent. I just don't think blaming the insurer or provider is fair either. I dump the blame on the data broker/ad network and to a far lesser extent the advertiser.