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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

>> Healthy employees save the company money and are more productive, and Quit Genius thinks it can not only help employees get healthier but give employers a way to track that progress.

> Dystopian.

Yup, but we've long crossed that bridge. We can only suggest that quality employees take a zero tolerance policy towards these invasive employers. I'm afraid we are not going to be able to rely on regulation to stop these practices since anything anti-smoking (or anti-terrorism or anti-CP) can only be seen by most as a benefit. It's a slower form of prohibitionism. People can only see one side of the smoking debate. Similar thing happened with alcohol age. "Can't get a job unless you follow these rules" is very similar to "can't get funds unless you follow these rules". Choice against "good" is disallowed one way or another.

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> Yup, but we've long crossed that bridge.

I think young generation simply doesn't care. Dystopian is something normal, natural for them. It is only older people that will struggle with it, but once they die, there will be whole new world, where freedom will be an extremist concept.

What???? Who told you that? What kind of proof do you have? It seems to me that it's just some meaningless sentence just to make empathy with dystopian views of the world, but without any real reflection in the real world.

This is just anecdotal. It is my observation of the world. It could be much different than yours and I hope it is.

I see this a lot in young people. They trust the cloud and privacy isn’t a big deal. That attitude will not change until something bad happens on a large scale that wakes the masses.

Simple example is when German intelligence service even before the start of the war was compiling details of Polish intelligentsia, cultural, social or political elites. So when they invaded Poland they knew where to look for Poles who could be a danger to the Reich in the newly acquired territories. And they executed them. One by one to destroy national identity. Now if back then something like Facebook existed, their job would have been much easier. This is what scares me, because when in future politicians decide that people of my views need to be "removed", that would be very easy to do. Just run a query against social media database and send kill squads.

And now they’d just send a drone after they obtained your gps coordinates. The labor of hunting classes of people down has dropped dramatically.

Fortunately, I believe invasiveness of that type is illegal under HIPAA.

Kinda. For the state I live in, it is believed that if it's just for "image" appeal it may not be considered a privacy concern [0]. So if you worked for QuitGenius in TX and part of their image is non-smoking, they may have such a requirement. But for affecting insurance premiums, nope (federal HIPAA violation). I think this is reasonable. Other states have laws that don't allow the employer to restrict off-duty legal activities. I personally appreciate Texas's approach to employer freedom until it becomes a problem. They take the same approach towards municipalities wrt smoking laws (i.e. statewide ban in many types of public places that were a problem then defer to local voters for others).

0 - https://www.texasemployerhandbook.com/2013/01/smoking-discri...

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