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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

> I, personally, don't want HR to send the company an email congratulating me on losing 5 pounds, or for them to bring me to their office to talk to me about how I had 5 drinks on Friday and that's binge drinking and outside company policy.

Who's suggesting this? A bit presumptuous to go from tracking "thing that definitely kills people [smoking]" to "things that are bad but not that bad [drinking, unhealthy eating]". Quite the slippery slope that thinking tracking smoking will lead to tracking everything.

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First, it's not a slippery slope, because there is a simple and logical progression for it, and examples in other fields - seatbelt laws, for example. Also, the article itself mentions tracking alcohol use and weight.

Why would you track smoking? Because the company pays more for insurance. So, it makes sense to track other things that are indicators for worse health outcomes, also causing higher insurance payments.

> seatbelt laws

What are you saying here? You've lost me. Seatbelts are good and the laws we have in place are there to keep ignorance about them from spreading (ie. if you've never gotten in an accident, why would you wear a seatbelt?). So I definitely agree that we slipped on this slope for a good reason.

The reason seatbelt laws exist is not because they are intrinsically good, or to prevent ignorance. They exist because it is expensive to pay for someone that has slammed through a windshield and requires intensive care. They passed in large part through the argument that putting them in place would lower insurance rates. That's where a lot of the money lobbying for their use came from.

They also passed so that the automakers wouldn't be forced to put airbags into cars.

> seatbelt laws, for example

I was all up with agreeing with you until this point - but I honestly find it quite incredible that there are still people that think seatbelts are a bad thing.

I'm not saying seatbelts are bad, I'm saying the reason the laws exist is in part based on a combination of NHTS data opened up with Reagan's move to regulate federal drinking laws and the idea that mandatory seatbelts would lower insurance costs.

It's an example of one thing being tracked moving down the line to something that the majority of people opposed also being tracked and legislated.

The step from tracking zero things to tracking one thing may be larger then the step from tracking one thing to tracking (almost) everything.

Companies already do this using things like Virgin Pulse.

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