The writer is the founder and publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation platform
Without much fanfare, Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences unit, has launched Coefficient Insurance. It was only a matter of time before Google’s parent got into the health insurance business — in fact, one wonders what took it so long. With Google’s intimate knowledge of our daily patterns, contacts and dreams, the search engine group has for years had a far better picture of risk than any insurer.
That Coefficient Insurance, which is also backed by Swiss Re, would initially focus on the relatively arcane area of stop-loss insurance to protect employers from staff health cost volatility should not obscure its ambitious agenda for the rest of the industry. Thus, according to Verily’s senior management, it might soon start monitoring at-risk employees via their smartphones and even coaching them towards healthier lifestyles.
This is not the first case of a big technology company trying to disrupt the healthcare industry. Amazon’s Alexa and Alphabet’s own DeepMind have recently made headlines with their controversial contracts with the UK’s NHS. Apple has collaborated with the health insurer Aetna on an app that uses Apple Watch data to reward users with healthier lifestyles. In late 2019, Facebook launched Preventive Health, a tool that recommends users have regular check-ups, based on their age and gender. And all this was before Covid-19, which made the operating systems run by Google and Apple central to digital contact tracing.
Not all of these endeavours are equally troublesome; some — like the Covid-19 contact tracing where the two tech giants followed the lead of privacy researchers — might even be laudable. Yet, Alphabet’s latest move, shrouded in the rhetoric of reducing the burden on the healthcare system by empowering employees with data about their lifestyles — is likely to prove problematic.
As with many services out of Silicon Valley, there is not much reflection about the probable reconfigurations of power among social groups — the sick and the healthy, the insured and the uninsured, the employers and the employees — that are likely to occur once the digital dust settles.
One would need to be extremely naive to believe that a more extensive digital surveillance system — in the workplace and, with Alphabet running the show, now also at home, in the car and wherever your smartphone takes you — is likely to benefit the weak and the destitute. Some good might come out of it — a healthier workplace, maybe — but we should also inquire who would bear the cost of this digital utopia.
Alas, the existing ways of regulating the digital economy are not of much help here. The recent EU inquiry into Google’s acquisition of Fitbit is a case in point, with European regulators worried that the influx of data from Fitbit devices might further entrench Google’s dominant position in the market for online advertising.
Shouldn’t one also worry about the data flowing in the other direction, from Google’s servers into Fitbit-like devices, especially now that the parent company has set its sights on the health insurance business? Do we want the data about our internet searches or geolocation to affect how our insurers or employers price our insurance policies?
Privacy law does not offer an adequate solution either. Under pressure from employers, most workers acquiesce to being monitored. This was obvious even before Alphabet’s foray into insurance, as plenty of smaller players have been pitching employers sophisticated workplace surveillance systems as a way of lowering healthcare costs.
Healthcare insurance is a microcosm of the wider problem with the governance of digital society. As platform-driven digitisation unfolds, politicians are failing to redistribute the vast power that accumulates once analogue and unconnected processes become digital and wired-up. In today’s unequal digital society, power accrues to those who already have too much of it, fuelling popular discontent with the elites and giving rise to conspiracy theories about the omnipotence of Silicon Valley.
Instead of founding institutions that could help the most vulnerable people to better shoulder the risks of digitisation, political parties still hand over the responsibility for taming the tech giants to the technocratic regulators with their existing frameworks, such as antitrust and data protection.
This strategy, after a decade of fits and starts, has failed to bear fruit. It is only by embracing a political — not technocratic — solution to the problem of unbalanced power that we can hope to address the inequities inherent in today’s digital economy.
"danger" - Google News
September 01, 2020 at 09:37PM
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The danger of Alphabet’s move into the risk business - Financial Times
"danger" - Google News
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