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Comment by jeron | Hacker News Reader

honestly I'd support a program where the more you work out the lower your insurance premiums would be. Pretty hard to cheat workouts with Apple Watch when it has a heart rate sensor and all that.

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It isn't a horrible idea in the abstract but it seems likely sex would trigger data similar to most workouts. Also, there are people who eat healthy but don't have time for the gym. Conversely people who go to the gym everyday but mostly to try to burn up their Big Mac combo meal. From an insurance standpoint, I think HA1C is the only measure we could like use. Things like BMI, etc. are too varied based on genetics.

You generally get what you measure, so be careful to measure what you want to get. Isn't elevated heart rate connected to better health outcomes no matter what physical activity it comes from? Why should the insurance company care if some of it is sex instead of, say, running?

it seems likely sex would trigger data similar to most workouts

Marketers would have a field day with that data.

At Runkeeper secret facilities, new year of 2019:

"This guy had increased heart rate followed by two minutes of physical activity... Joe, call Pfizer immediately!"

>it seems likely sex would trigger data similar to most workouts

Accelerometers and GPS would allow them to narrow down specific types and patterns of sex as well. Lots of sex in cheap motels == high risk. Correlating customers together..this one has HIV, and appears to be having sex with this customer == high risk. Fun.

You're okay with corporations having extremely intrusive tools to track your behavior and control it through price for their own benefit?

For health (which we're talking about), life, or car insurance (since a bunch of UK insurers also have "safe driving" apps that earn you points, etc.), yeah, sure, why not?

Because obviously they can use those to profit by dropping eg people they diagnose (or just infer statistically) with serious problems before they develop, or raise their prices, etc.

This is not about some extra win-win motivation to be healthier...

It's about turning risk (which is supposed to be what insurance companies are paid for) into rent-seeking...

If the insurance scheme is public, incentivizing individuals to remain healthy in order to lower the cost for everyone is a civil duty.

Vitality (in the UK) link with a whole range of things - Health, Fitbit, Garmin, Polar, Moves, Nokia, etc.

Although you get rewards from them (Starbucks drinks, cinema tickets, etc.) rather than straight discounts on your insurance.

It's super easy. Strap it to someone else.

Or to a machine, like Howard did on the Big Bang Theory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnTXqqCVaSI

True for current exercise tracking. I don't know about the future "large swaths of new health data" though.

Well, perhaps a sufficiently complex machine that can fool their sensors, then.

That reminds me, back during the Tamagotchi craze (which coincided with the Pokemon craze) there was a virtual pet Pikachu that rewarded you for walking (it was a pedometer) and the screen would show Pikachu walking while you were. It was pretty cute. Well, it wasn't long before my little brother figured out how to "cheat" He put it on the washer. (I think dryer worked as well)

You could cheat by giving the watch to someone else to do a workout for you?

I imagine someone working out with like 6 fitness trackers attached to them.

Strap one to your largish dog with a heart rate close to human range.

What I would be afraid of, here, is that if there are signs that big data can uncover that peel out some catastrophic disease from your workout data that would mean your insurance company knows you're very ill long before you do... It would extremely tempting not to do something about that knowledge that helps the company even if it hurts a soon-to-be-dead-anyway person.

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