What is at stake throughout the health technology sector are structural questions about who the health data economy will benefit. In the long term, customers and patients who give up their data for free or a relatively low cost might be the product, not the beneficiary — just like in other online social networks. The sector’s norms of exchanging data with third parties from drug companies to advertisers piggybacks on the now widely suspect data-for-cash business model of many tech platforms. Potential users thus need to consider whether the promise of more health knowledge today is truly worth a potential lifetime of precarity and discrimination in any of the many scenarios in which their data travels in unanticipated ways.

Hat-tip Alyssa Jocson Porter!

Read more:

Glabau, D. (2019, April 25). Bill of health. Real Life Mag. https://reallifemag.com/bill-of-health/