Activision Blizzard pays its employees to use health-tracking software, reports the Washington Post. Since 2014, the studio known for Overwatch, Starcraft, and other classics has taken the time to compensate workers who use the Ovia pregnancy tracking app. Since this inclusion, the company has expanded to track mental health, diet, sleep, and more.
Unsurprisingly, employees weren’t a fan of this tracking at first, according to Milt Ezzard, vice president of global benefits at Activision Blizzard. “Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: ‘You’re prying into our lives,’” he says. “But we slowly increased the sensitivity of stuff, and eventually people understood it’s all voluntary, there’s no gun to your head, and we’re going to reward you if you choose to do it.”
The “reward” Ezzard refers to is $1 gift cards every day, at least in the case of Ovia. This pregnancy app has women input their sleep schedule, diet, weight, amount of sex, and other statistics. Then, Activision Blizzard pays Ovia for anonymous versions of the data to find average pregnancy lengths, time of labor, the number of miscarriages, among others. “I want them to have a healthy baby because it’s great for our business experience,” says Ezzard.
Sure, Ovia’s data sharing is legal under the Accountability Act and other health laws. But even if data is anonymous there’s still the security risks. Paula M. Castaño, a clinician-researcher, understands the “benefit of analyzing large data sets.” However, she says this also brings up concerns “with [companies] lack of general clinical applicability and focus on variables that affect time out of work and insurance utilization.” Essentially, Activision Blizzard can use the information to manipulate insurance policies in favor of the company.
Plus, experts in health say it’s not very hard for bad actors to “re-identify” data with the person in question. Plus, it’s not like there’s a ton of pregnant women in a company at one time. Even with incentives, it’s tough to say if this tracking is a good or a bad idea. Deborah C. Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights, a Texas nonprofit, is against the idea:
“The fact that women’s pregnancies are being tracked that closely by employers is very disturbing. There’s so much discrimination against mothers and families in the workplace, and they can’t trust their employer to have their best interests at heart.”
On the other hand, it’s useful for companies to know this information so they can plan accordingly. According to an Ovia marketing sheet, “an average of 33 hours of productivity are lost for every round of treatment”. While these apps are great for the women in pregnancy, it’s the data-sharing that’s somewhat strange. It’s simply unrealistic to always expect a company to have your best interests at heart. With the recent BioWare story that brought to light Anthem’s stressful development, among all the other recent stories of crunch time in the games industry, who knows which employers truly use this data for the good of its people.
