Slashdot Mirror
Fitbit Wants To Help Corporations Track Employee Health
jfruh writes: Fitbit is pitching its iconic fitness trackers to businesses as a tool to save money on health care costs. Many companies have wellness programs to encourage workers to exercise more, and Fitbit will help employers quantify (and monitor) employee progress. “We think virtually every company will incorporate fitness trackers into their corporate wellness programs,” Fitbit CFO Bill Zerella said
Maybe they can come monitor my food when I'm at home or out about town, too?
And maybe they can monitor when I wake and sleep.
And maybe monitor what kind of air I breath in my part of town.
And maybe they can just get a direct pipe into all my medical records? I mean, since apparently we give no fucks anymore, right?
I have a better idea: You hire me to do a fucking job and I'll do the fucking job and we'll leave our involvement with each other right fucking there.
I work for the University of Washington (so I'm a state employee), and starting with 2015 our health plan has included a "wellness incentive" which, if met, drops $125 off an employee's annual deductible. For this current year, it was a simple matter of making a couple attestations ("I don't smoke", "I exercise at least 3 days a week"). For 2016, though, it's gotten a bit more intrusive - one of the ways you can earn points towards the incentive is to record daily step counts and exceed 35000 steps per week, which you could either do manually or by giving the website access to your FitBit data (it also supported several other trackers). Other ways to earn points included "Try Tai Chi", "Fill out an Advance Directive", "See a Mentor", "No Stress Mondays", and so on.
Given the move Washington State has made towards both intrusiveness and nanny-state-dom, and given that by state law pretty much all our job-related data is public record, I would not be surprised if at some point people who gave permission to access their fitness trackers to find that someone in the monitoring chain started checking when activity is occurring. This could be a problem for someone if, like me, they often don't get a conventional lunch hour due to job duties. I'm often eating after 1pm (or even after 2pm) simply because it works better with tasks I'm doing - so when I go for my lunchtime walk, it's not usually between 12 and 1. Fortunately I'm not naive enough to give them access to my Garmin Viviosmart data, but a less paranoid person could end up with a nasty surprise come annual evaluation time.
#DeleteChrome