You've come a long way baby! And thanks to Ovia, your mom's employer knows all about it
The Denver Post (Tracking your pregnancy on an app may be more public than you think) has published an interesting and disturbing article about the rise of Ovia, an app that collects detailed and personal data from pregnant women and those hoping to conceive. I'm not surprised that the business model is to provide data to employers about their workforce in order to save on medical costs and reduce time away from work. But I am a little surprised at how much data employees are willing to enter on topics like their sex life, color of cervical fluid, miscarriages and so on, while the app also track things like what medical conditions they looked up.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said [Diana] Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video-game company Activision Blizzard. The decision to track her pregnancy had been made easier by the $1 a day in gift cards the company paid her to use the app: That’s “diaper and formula money,” she said.
As I remind people using "free" apps --or ones they are paid to use-- you're not the customer, you're the product. There's plenty written on this topic so I won't bother to rehash it here, but it's worth remembering that the data provided by Diller and others can be combined with tons of other data from their use of Google, Facebook, Waze, exercise trackers, and more to create incredibly detailed and personal profiles.In 2008 I wrote a brief blog post called Baby formula in the mailbox. "Honey, is there something I should know?" I was puzzled to see that it still gets a lot of hits in 2019 and that readers are still commenting about their own experiences. Back then, an au pair who worked for us had received baby formula from Abbott Nutrition. Somehow, some marketer thought she was pregnant. It was kind of embarrassing and of course could be problematic for a family relationship or if the pregnancy had ended prematurely.Online data gathering has come a long way in the past decade. If Abbott once guessed you were pregnant, imagine how much more they --or many others-- knows about you now. Maybe the users of these apps aren't naive, just fatalistic about the idea that everyone knows everything anyway, so why not just take the formula and diaper money and run?In a few years, Diller's child will probably find the Denver Post article or maybe even this blog post. If that person is you, I'd be interested to know how you feel about it.---By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.