The Privacy / Big Tech angle is attention grabbing, but is grossly missing the point. In my opinion, the reality is we need to decide if this type of discrimination is something we as a society want to regulate or not.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19198 [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2... [3] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/explaining-hea...

Some thing’s are not be a big risk to society until they get amplified.

It's not impossible that that would happen, but it would be a departure from current behavior. To some degree, Google is selective about what data does and doesn't feed into ad targeting.

Examples:

(1) Emails are sensitive, and Gmail messages are off limits: "Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads." (https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/)

(2) Drive/Docs/Sheets/Slides (if I'm interpreting this right): "We will not use your content for marketing or promotional campaigns." (https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/)

And they've already stated they don't use health data: "We do not show ads based on sensitive information or interests, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories." (https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/140378)

It is very reasonable to ask how your data might be used or misused. But the scenario here supposes that Google will change its general pattern of behavior and go against what it publicly said.

Note I hadn't clicked the link yet, simply read the small paragraph my friend wrote along with the YT link "hey check this guy out he is using autocad for blah blah".

That was the day I stopped using Gmail.

Me and my friend have an interest in model aircrafts and drones and often spoke in person about building a new drone/airplane from scratch as fun project and this was the first time that Autocad was even mentioned in our discussion. Another data point we are both old school and would talk about this over beers in the pub rather than through messaging apps.

The only thing linking me to Autocad was that single email I got in Gmail.

I'm sure you can come up with reasons this is not breaking T&C but it would have never happened if the two products were in separate companies.

And I'm sure they will "not use" the health data in a similar fashion.

Additionally I wouldn't find it weird for calendar or maps to make suggestions based on gmail. That is the value proposition by adopting the Google ecosystem.

Of course, you could just as easily conclude that they're lying, but I find that harder to believe.

Everyone has some stories about how Google drew a suspicious correlation between products not supposed to be connected. In my case, there was one day where I wanted to watch an MP4 copy of Harry Potter I had on my NAS while on a work trip. Obtained ages ago. I uploaded it to my G-Suite Business Google Drive (not shared, nothing was pirated here despite ripping blurays still being a legal ish-zone). Later that day, YouTube started suggesting clips from Harry Potter to me.

Suspicious. Not damning. Are they scanning my Google Drive for filenames to feed to the YouTube recommendation engine? I don't know. Maybe it was just chance, or maybe a few days ago I clicked on a random article about JK Rowling's latest drama and that was enough to trigger three layers of indirection through the Google Brain and suddenly I love Harry Potter (I don't. Its fine. I'm sure after writing this out, though, Google's opinion on My opinion of it will be reinforced.)

But lets say I never watched those videos recommended to me. Is the YouTube recommendation engine data fed to their ad engine? What if I never click on something, but the system knows it presented it, and maybe I like Harry Potter anyway? I don't know. But it seems feasible, doesn't it? And if that's the case, then the data traveled two steps, where each step on its own is weird, but reasonably ok, but the two steps together look less ok.

We're really talking about the absolute cutting edge here; Google is building a brain processing exabytes of data. If you're in engineering; have you ever worked in a job where you felt like you knew how every part of the system worked? I work at a company with 10 people and I still don't feel that. Why would Google be any different? Teams talk to other teams. A middle manager two jumps up approves it. They get access to a database. Data travels around. An engineering lead at the top thinks they have a grasp on everything, a grasp spuriously assembled from reports written by people who themselves understand some non-100 percent of whats going on in their silo. Things fall through the cracks, it happens all the time, and in this case we're talking about buses of data so big that no one could even look at it all to verify what's in there is what they think is in there (and if they did actually have humans look at it, that'd have concerns on its own).

This is my pet theory: That the desires and realities of Google are so different that even what they say is untrustworthy because no one there knows whats actually going on anymore.

Regarding the spooky coincidence effect: the truth is that people are a lot more predictable than they assume they are. More often than not, when you're doing a thing related to X and then 10 minutes later you see an X ad, it's because you're actually in the bucket of people who like X and the buckets are highly correlative. You might be in that bucket because you like Y and 95% of people who like Y like X, and a search for Y, followed by doing something related to X, triggered the X ad because of the Y search. There's also huge confirmation bias on those coincidence ad views; everyone has a story of one, but I've yet to meet anyone who said "I sat down and recorded every ad I was shown for a week. 90% of them correlated with an activity I was doing in an unrelated Google product between 5 and 10 minutes before the ad was shown."

I can absolutely see this happening due to their sheer size losing control as everything is probably silo'd and confusing.

Due to a tax issue last year, I urgently needed a specific from a former GIANT company I worked for per my accountant.

It took over 6 days of calling, emailing and getting transferred around the bureaucracy because they had recently outsourced that HR function to another company and moved all the data and the Director of HR for that entire 1000 person department couldn't even get me the form and didn't know what to do! She and I had to put in a ticket together to the help desk and eventually someone at the outsourced help desk escalated it enough that we found out the physical forms were actually in transit to the east bay offsite location and had not been digitized yet which is why they were not able to provide the form until a 14-business day turnaround.

It was the most absurd and frustrating experience and definitely made me happy I'd moved to a more midsized org. We might not be an industry Titan but at least are small enough to be functional and not get entirely lost in bureaucracy.

It's completely bonkers that we insist on doing it this way.

In this case, the health insurance industry could use statistical tricks to counter the allegation that they are discriminating at a significant level.

If an insurer could see the future, he would give me a policy that costs (cost of my future accidents + X% profit)/(my lifetime)

Essentially turning insurance into like bad savings account with negative interest rate.

The reasons it's a great idea are (1) you don't get to borrow from your future savings account's balance, and (2) insurers often encourage not-totally-rational customers to practice better habits to reduce costs. The first point is what customers want: avoidance of bankruptcy.

My expected cost of future accidents might be N, with variance M >> N.

The insurance pool can absorb it if I have a catastrophic outcome, but I can't.

So it may be worth buying an insurance contract with a negative expected value to hedge risks.

But what happens when (cost of my future accidents) is very high? Are you as an individual just uninsurable? Is that the best outcome?

Distribution of cumulative healthcare costs maybe looks something like a lognormal distribution. Most people fall into a "normal" range but then there are outliers who can cost far, far more. But even though their individual costs are high, their absolute numbers are low compared to the total pool. So everyone can pay something like a normal expected cost, plus a small fraction, plus the profit overhead, and thereby cover those outliers.

Large employers will negotiate pooled coverage like this for their employees. That's why the 21-year-old with zero health issues pays the same as the 60-year-old with dialysis. But, it's the fact that this is essentially a monopoly market on those employees that allows this. They can create a single pool because there's no alternative market. (At least functionally, because the costs of those external market players don't get the employer subsidizing the plan.)

Without that monopoly and subsidy, market forces come into play. For those people who have a high likelihood of lower costs, if an insurer can create a pool targeting people with those same signals, then they can offer that pool lower rates and capture business. However, that necessitates that the remaining pools become more expensive. This is a classic race to the bottom, but with the added complexity of a zero-sum game.

Your stated position is the logical end-game of this direction. But it's not the only functional solution. One could also switch instead to a single pool over the entire population -- aka, single payer.

- They price policies based on the new information, causing some customers rated as high risk to move to other insurers without access to this data.

- Insurer B realises that they are making less money (or more realistically, losing more) and invests in source of data.

- Higher risk customers end up paying more for insurance.

- Smaller competitor comes in and insures higher-risk customers (Quote Devil in the UK are a good example here), and offloads the risk to reinsurers. Additionally, because not all high risk customers will claim, smaller competitor can make money.

- New source of data becomes available, rinse and repeat.

Note that the difference between insurers having more granular data vs aggregated data is not less price discriminination, it's price discrimination based on coarser features (zip/post code, age, etc).

And that's the whole point behind my prior comment. As long as insurers can directly exclude individuals -- or indirectly exclude through price discrimination -- this is a completely sane way for them to behave. But it's not the only way to build the system, and this is definitely one of those times to ask, "Is this the best this society can do? Is this what our society actually wants?"

And I also have a feeling auto insurance is more sane in the UK due to the public healthcare being offloaded. In the US they severely cap medical payouts. We're talking like tens of thousands, which is laughably small here for anything serious. That will cover one ER visit. Instead, they give a big number for liability coverage of injury caused to others. So if the incident wasn't your fault, you're relying on that other person's liability coverage to make you whole, not your own insurance. Unless of course they were uninsured and you have uninsured motorist coverage. And if you're found at fault, then better hope you have some other way to cover that gap.

[0] But I still go with Citizens as long as they'll keep me. Because I'd rather pay directly into the public system than pay some for-profit company that's just going to beg for public bailouts when something big happens anyway.

I do agree with you in terms of the societal benefit piece, but was just trying to give some insight with respect to how the industry works now (without taking a position on how it should work).

My personal belief is that we should only allow individual level features to be considered, because otherwise you end up in a position where people living in richer areas both have more money and pay less for insurance (which is rational from an insurer perspective).

That being said, insurance doesn't really make any money, and is probably something that would be better provided by the state (especially for things like auto, which people are forced by the state to have).

Just want to let you know that I appreciate the info. Cheers!

I'd bet money that with consistent access to sleep cycles, heart rate, blood pressure, ecg, and body temperature combined with device analytics (screen time, content watched/listened to) you could easily come up with a behavioral model that identifies users suffering from depression and anxiety.

And while it could be useful and positive (for example, they already can identify and target smokers with smoking cessation ads), I'm more afraid of malicious actors targeting people already prone to destructive behavior with feedback loops that worsen their symptoms and profit off it.

For example: User 123 is experiencing a panic attack. Send notification that Uber Eats now delivers alcohol.

On a serious note, Doesn't insurance companies already partner with fitness monitors? They claim to provide incentives for good health by offering discounts in premium but then again it could also mean higher premium if any health issues are detected by these fitness monitors irrespective of its accuracy.

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/my-experience-with-fitbit-charge-...

[2]https://abishekmuthian.com/insurers-are-putting-the-lives-of...

When the heart rate monitor is switched off, there is no pain/tingling even if I wear it tight and this has been corroborated by many others in fitbit/apple watch forums.

But since, most of these cases are due to wearing it tight (or the manufacturers want to project it that way) the heart rate monitor issue is not getting enough attention.

I also switch from left to right. Maybe that makes a difference?

The other thing is that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Once you loosen it fully it moves around on your arm, which might move the harmful parts away from whatever is vulnerable.

Do we know what exactly causes the tingling? My left hand is still numb almost a week after I was first injured.

Although loosening might help you place heart rate monitor at a different place or avoid direct contact with skin; in my(our) experience switching off HR produced definitive results immediately.

The reason for why HR does this is speculative(I've covered in my blog), as long as the consumers demand strong action from the manufacturers we're not going to find the reason.

This cuts to the heart of the common, disingenuous, privacy bromide of "we don't sell your personal information." Of course you don't – you sell sophisticated insights about me derived from it.

But practically, no; nobody's going to randomly click an ad link someone else handed them for funsies. In the common case, the ad company will be able to do conversions on the target demo (and make strong assumptions about the target demo, even if Google doesn't explicitly leak that data).

No idea if they share the "That click was fraud" signal with their clients for this kind of display ad.

On a related tangent, CloudFlare creating a Google Analytics tracker could help lessen Google's tracking. But this battle should've been waged about 10 years ago. It's a shame that Hydra has many formidable heads.

There's room for abuse, but Google will slap wrists of advertisers who try it.

I don't know whether Google will slap any wrists. It went so far that their ads hijacked the browser and redirected to scam sites. I've been on the debugging end on a few such attacks over the years, and it just happened once every other year or so on sites with a healthy amount of traffic. The scammers do try to fly under the radar (only targeting specific sites, only targeting mobile and specific demographics to make it harder to track). If they simply didn't allow them the access, the problem wouldn't exist.

It is a feature of their display ads system that user privacy is protected and advertisers shouldn't be able to solve to a user when the ad is displayed (though they can, of course, begin a business arrangement with a user if the user clicks the ad; that's called a "conversion"). Scammers that abuse the JS layer fly under the radar because Google will ban their display ads account if they get caught abusing what the JS allows them to access (such as trying to data-scrape parameters off the user's machine to estimate whether they're seeing someone they've already seen).

"3 Ad Serving. (a) Customer will not provide Ads containing malware, spyware or any other malicious code or knowingly breach or circumvent any Program security measure." [https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/54818?hl=en]

That targeted ads might cause these kinds of problems is a side effect of this.

In the US, this kind of data aggregation doesn't even make waves regarding antitrust. Google just has to comply with HIPAA and it's basically good to go (they already had "Google Health" as an app for self-reported data ages ago, which nobody stopped).

If Google started feeding this data to insurance companies, it'd be out of compliance with HIPAA.

Make no mistake though: those days are coming. It's just a matter of how soon. And no government will give a shit to stop it.