[nhance]

In my mind, one of the most likely consumers of our data is insurance companies. It really exposes to me how messed up the idea of health insurance really is.

As an insurance company, you are incentivized to de-risk your pool as much as possible, and by spending a few dollars you're able to get to the earliest possible signals of who might be needing services very easily. Things like complaining about a sore throat on social media to friends, or even within private messages, are all things you might be interested in. Other signals, purchase history, location history, contact tracing, all of these provide potential ways to spot early risk and increase rates/push out the undesirable members of the pool.

Of all of the potential customers of our data, I keep coming back to insurance companies as having the most interest in these signals. When you can identify risks correctly, you can trim out or adjust rates to make things as safe as possible for your income stream.

This has a reactionary component to it that hurts us all. With most of our communication being digital now, I find myself thinking twice about putting out anything that could be taken as a signal to an insurance company. As an avid runner with most of our events organized online, this presents a social cost because I just won't engage in some conversations for fear of how companies will use whatever I might engage with against me.

Where does this type of behavior lead when practiced at scale?