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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why people care or pretend to care about this. "Oh no, someone queried my sleep data to report aggregated metrics! How horrible." Even the more "invasive" forms of this stuff seem completely untroubling to me. If I sleep too little I'll start seeing ads for melatonin or warm milk or something? Good, I want to see offers that are tailored to what I actually experience. How is this supposed to be bad?

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There is a duality between observation and control. The more precisely you can measure and predict a system, then the easier it gets to drive the system to whatever state you'd like.

Desiring privacy and resisting control are reasonable things people who enjoy their freedom and autonomy would want to do.

Imagine the data showing you only went to bed at 2am being used to argue a car accident was your fault, when it wasn’t.

There are plenty of ways your data can be used against you and used to make incorrect assumptions about you.

Ah, so the danger of this technology comes from imagining unrelated bad things happening to people. What if your phone activity revealed that you were awake at 2 am and then courts incorrectly blamed you for an accident? Well, the bad part is courts incorrectly blaming you for an accident, same as with the sleep data.

I personally think it is more important to remember that this info is not necessarily limited to "only courts". Typically, this info is available to anyone with the right amount of cash. Not that I think my sleep data is interesting or valuable...someone seems to think it is...and that should be concerning.

I think the danger in both scenarios is the fact that this data is available for abuse in the first place. It doesn't have to be. You're opening yourself up to the potential that unrelated bad things might happen in return for personalized ads.

Note, this isn't illegal or (in my opinion) even unethical, it just makes me and many others uncomfortable. If that's a tradeoff happy with, then more power to ya!

There is a lot of literature in this area of philosophy. This is the famous "You have nothing to hide if you do nothing wrong" which has been proven 1000 times to be a fallacy.

Yes, which is why I also don't want my phone data to be hoovered up by data brokers and appearing in evidence exhibits.

"Getting poor sleep I see. Sounds like this person is higher risk than the average population. After review it seems we should increase all insurance plans by 20%"

I guess that is mostly only applicable in the US with our for profit healthcare system though.

It's applicable in the US in the sense that it's illegal to do.

Insurance companies have no issue adjusting car insurance rates based on the "safe driving monitor" that they provide you put in your car. Even if you drive safe they adjust by mileage. Not sure how this is any different...just another line in the TOS.

It isn't just health insurance you need to think about.

It's illegal only if you have the means to bring a lawsuit forward and reasonably prove this is happening, which is difficult without a full third-party audit of the codebase of the company.

Illegally applicable. The best kind of applicable.

Who do you want to live your life? Is it really your life if all your choices are being taken from you and other entities pretend to know your needs better than you?

This is about autonomy and protecting civil liberties. Surveillance should be viewed through the lens of "would this be okay if a person was in place of the machine?"

I do not want someone watching my sleep so they can tell all their friends.

It's totally fair if you aren't bothered by it. It's also totally fair that others are.

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