[MyData & Open Data] How activity trackers remove our rights to our most intimate data

Wed Jun 4 14:27:00 UTC 2014

Thanks Rayna. I tried Google translation and got the gist of the article,
but your summary is really helpful.

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Rayna <rayna.st at gmail.com> wrote:

> We thus have a case where an insurance company associates personal
> tracking devices to health insurance offers. What would happen if the
> tracker tells you are not doing enough of physical activity on a regular
> basis? Would this turn you into a "bad client" and be used as a reason to
> not insure you? Such a discussion is not new (hint: personalised medecine
> discussions, especially with the surge of personal genomics).

Yup, nothing surprising about the above. It is a natural progression of the
way things are going, and some may consider it good as well. Both
incentives to be healthy and disincentives to not be healthy are inevitable
when one has a system tied to insurance. I mean, this is nothing new to
health. It applies to any kind of insurance—car (younger than 25? insurance
is higher; had an accident? insurance is higher, etc.), flood plain, cargo.

Some may even argue that anything that changes behavior toward making
people healthy is a good thing.

Of course, the other side is, as you say, "a reason not to insure you."
Nothing new there as well. Unless the larger set absorbs the distributed
cost, the cost of insuring the more risky will be higher or even
prohibitive. One of the goals of Obamacare here in the U.S. is to make it
mandatory to get insurance so the cost is spread thusly over a greater
population.

I know there are tremendous and tremendously difficult associated
quandaries. Do we all bear the risk for those who intentionally indulge in
risky behavior? (surely those performing dangerous stunts in movies should
have to pay a higher premium, no?) What about those who are at a greater
risk simply by virtue of race or gender? (South Asian males, such as moi,
are at a great risk of heart disease).

On the flip side, my various insurance programs over the years have always
had programs that reward me for eating better or exercising more ($100 off
a gym membership, for example).

All these trackers are doing is making all this more easy and mechanistic.
It would be useful to guard against it devolving to a less humane power,
but the trend is inevitable.

-- 
Puneet Kishor
Manager, Science and Data Policy
Creative Commons
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