Aetna’s Carepass Opens a New Front in the Privacy War
Insurance companies have an interest in their insureds’ health, and it’s a benign interest: they lose if you lose. So it makes sense for Aetna to distribute an app , called Carepass, that helps their customers track their fitness goals and medical stats, and provides health information. Everything personal in the app has been consciously entered by the user. The tool merely offers policyholders encouragement towards adopting healthy practices and, really, it doesn’t seem too sinister. The article explains that the app has APIs that would allow the user to share the content they’ve collected, perhaps with their medical care providers. Still well and good. But the article goes on to advocate that insurance companies provide financial incentives to their customers to use the app and share the data. That might be good business sense, but from the consumer standpoint that seems like Big Brother’s thin edge of the wedge.
