"Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers"

The writer of this article, Jathan Sadowski, was co-author of one of the most popular pieces to which we've linked. See after the jump.
From Real Life:

Draining the Risk Pool

The rental company U-Haul made headlines recently when it announced that its employees would be prohibited from using nicotine of any kind. The policy, which went into effect on February 1 in 21 states across the U.S., caused a stir, as commentators were quick to point out how invasive it was, undermining employees’ autonomy not merely on the job but in their personal lives. The company framed the decision as an effort to create a “culture of wellness.” Sure, it might seem paternalistic, but really U-Haul is looking out for the best interests of its “team members” by taking a tough-love approach to their bad habits. In reality, this is likely to mean that people who don’t smoke (or vape or chew) will get hired over those who promise to quit. Bonus: no more employees sneaking away for smoke breaks.

Corporate wellness programs pervert the posture of caring to justify the implementation of intrusive technologies

U-Haul is not the only company to prohibit nicotine, and it is far from the first to implement policies that authorize the monitoring of employees’ behavior on and off work. Corporate wellness programs, as Gordon Hull and Frank Pasquale detail in this 2018 paper, are often driven by concerns that exceed supporting healthy habits or even cutting down on “time theft.” They are in fact the insidious product of the U.S.’s unique entanglement of employers and health insurers, which works to create leverage over employees who have little control over the terms of their coverage. Ultimately, wellness programs are about exercising that leverage, reducing the risk profile of employees and thus cutting the employer’s costs for health insurance plans.

Once initiated, corporate wellness programs pervert the posture of caring to justify the implementation of intrusive technologies. Such programs, for instance, will typically offer incentives if people use certain data-collecting devices, share personal data, or meet regular quantified goals. This might mean wearing fitness trackers, using apps to track your eating habits, or recording your moods in a digital diary — all valuable data an insurer would check for compliance and use it to extrapolate other useful underwriting information.

To paraphrase economist Joan Robinson’s famous line about exploitation, the misery of health insurance under capitalism is nothing compared with the misery of not being insured at all. But the difficulty for many Americans simply to acquire health insurance shouldn’t distract us from the inseparable issue of how to avoid being screwed, abused, scrutinized, and controlled by our insurers. While we are absorbed by trying to overcome the misery of getting it, there are major innovations intensifying the complications of having it.

While health insurers have been at the forefront of experimenting with techniques for learning more about and thus exerting further control over their policyholders, other types of insurance have also discovered the power of what has come to be known as “insurtech,” an industry term (akin to “fintech”) for the companies and products that hope to drive these shifts in what insurers can do, what they know about us, and how they operate.

Back in 2002, legal scholars Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon argued that “within a regime of liberal governance, insurance is one of the greatest sources of regulatory authority over private life.” The industry’s ability to record, analyze, discipline, and punish people may in some instances surpass the power of government agencies. Jump nearly two decades in the future and insurance companies’ powers have only grown. As insurers embrace the whole suite of “smart” systems (which I detail in my recent book) — networked devices, digital platforms, data extraction, algorithmic analysis — they are now able to intensify those practices and implement new techniques, imposing more direct pressure on private lives....

....MUCH MORE

As reprised in  December 2018:
"The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of The Smart City"

One of the more important—and surprisingly popular—pieces we linked to in the past year..
First posted April 22, 2018
We are fans of Professor Pasquale, don't know his co-author....

Well we know him now.
If interested see also:
April 2019 
"Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism" 

We've visited the author of this piece a couple other times and found him to be a very interesting guy.
Although titles like the one above might elicit a "Oh another one of those articles" reaction, Sadowski exhibits subject mastery that takes his stuff beyond pop exposition to pieces worthy of serious attention....

August 2018
Potemkin AI: Many instances of 'artificial intelligence' are artificial displays of its power and potential