John Hancock will include fitness tracking in all life insurance policies
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Established insurers that dont start their own incentive program to keep these healthy lives are in for a very rough time as Vitality will spread like a cancer.
Bet John Hancock would hate that solution. I mean, once you've covered your expenses, everything else is just luxury and hubris.
Health insurance is something that pays for things continuously while you are alive to keep you alive and healthy.
Live insurance pays your beneficiaries (usually people that depend on your salary) when you die.
If they can prove you were cheating the fitness tracker they can deny the insurance claim when you die. Not great for any family members who were counting on that.
It's the standard trick: the company will offer temporarily lower prices, then once enough people are onboard, increase them again.
The company sets a new normal, gets all your fitness data, the people get a temporary price reduction, and lose their privacy.
Yup, sign me out as well.
Did somebody made an analysis of life costs in the USA vs Europe ?
I am in my thirties so the money I am making since I have moved here is pretty great (I also could have gotten higher paying jobs in Europe though) but it sure looks like a lot of factors are counterbalancing this, including the shameful health care system (or its absence really), so even if I was not already planning on moving somewhere else in a couple of years, this would make me consider it.
Besides I haven't seen any of those incentives that really had teeth (usually you can avoid the penalty by not being fat, or by doing something silly and ultimately meaningless like meeting with a diatician).
At first, in order to spoof daily steps, maybe you can just throw the tracker into a clothes dryer or rock tumbler, or maybe inside your hubcap. If they want to see heartrate also, then I predict a device that you place against the tracker's IR sensor and blinks IR back at it, simulating a heartbeat. This would cost a few dollars in parts.
The next step of course is to simply spoof the tracker and upload directly to the company's internal API.
That’s where it will be hard for your loved ones to find out that they’ll finally get nothing.
This big brother stuff is outrageous by the way.
If someone is not incentivized to adopt healthier habits due to the benefits of actually being healthier or feeling better are they really going to by a "incentivized" by their life insurance premiums?
It's also laughable to think one could ever be "winning" when they have agreed to wear a corporate tracking device.
It's not just the project I'm on. It's a company attitude that it can't afford the problems that arise from bad data collection policies. My gut says this is sensational journalism.
John Hancock may not be monitoring my location (although every mobile device already is) but by its own admission, it will be monitoring my activity levels, computing the number of steps I take (or whatever other health metric it plans to use e.g. heart rate) and applying some formula to penalize employees who are "underperforming" on their health "goals." Insurance is already an enormously intrusive industry and fitness tracking crosses the threshold of unacceptable conduct.
Was your first sentence a warning about the rest of your response?
Just because its not intrusive at the moment, it does not eliminate the slippery slope that it can cause. Because if we mandate fitness trackers today, tomorrow they might be used to monitor you during the workday, for "stress reasons". This is one of the main reasons why at least i dont like this.
Another reason i personally dont like this, is that it allows the insurance company to build an even bigger profile on me, and my data. Then sooner or later, that data will get sold off, stolen, or just gifted away. Also, how do we know other apps on your phone wont start stealing the info? Maybe Facebook will add it to their increasing list of info it collects, or google will add is as part of usability improvements or some other bs excuse.
edit: spelling
As someone with decades of experience in privacy-related aspects of tech, let me tell you this: your company is already deceiving itself. It's like an addict, it wants the data, but thinks it can keep things under control if it just doesn't do too much.
There is no "safe" amount of personal tracking.
No matter what you think your plans are, no matter how much you delude yourself that "that will never happen", the bad things will happen. By deciding that this line of business will profit you (and I am speaking both to the person and the company), you will inevitably and without a doubt end up harming folks that you claim you won't.
"No more geolocation than is necessary" is a great example of the addict justifying the fix.
This changes the math a bit, and makes it clear that the "free" incentives aren't actually free. You're just paying for them in a different way (especially if you don't hit the activity targets). Maybe you come out a little ahead if you hit all the targets, but not as far ahead as you think.
https://www.virginpulse.com/use-case/reduce-healthcare-costs...
I'd love to be one of their customers, if I can get a Series 4 out of it. Not just to have the watch, but also the incentive to stay active.
EDIT: this is my most downvoted comment ever, and I have no idea why. I assumed others reading this article might also wonder if their programs apply to the new Apple Watches. Apparently I was wrong?