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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

I am a senior software engineer with John Hancock. I can say with quite a bit of certainty that the Orwellian conspiracy is just paranoia. I can't tell you how many boring but necessary meetings I've sat through around what data we can cache on user's devices and ensuring we don't collect more geolocation data than necessary.

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.

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This is a simply ridiculous response. Geolocation is the least intrusive data that is being discussed here. By far the bigger offense is tracking an individual's health to ensure that the employee is sufficiently "healthy."

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.

The number of steps you take is more intrusive than where you've been? I'm supposed to believe John Hancock is going to bring about the boring dystopia you describe because you claim insurance is enormously intrusive?

Was your first sentence a warning about the rest of your response?

And developers who refuse to see other people's points are the exact reason we get these issues. That does not mean that you are wrong or that the people here are wrong.

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

What if I simply don't want to wear a fitness tracker? You don't find forcing people to wear mandatory devices a little troubling?

> It's a company attitude that it can't afford the problems that arise from bad data collection policies.

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.

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