Empty Hands
Senior Master
They control more than just your entire ability to obtain credit, now they can tell your doctor or insurance company all about your medication use!
LINK You just have to see this **** to believe it. FICO claims that with no more than a name and address, they are happy to provide a comprehensive score to your insurance company, doctor or pharmaceutical company that shows how likely you are to adhere to your medication use. They claim to use "retail purchase behavior, geo-credit profiles, and income/wealth indicators" (among other data sources) to produce this number.
They also claim that this process is "HIPAA compliant", yet they also promise to provide this score based on a name and address, so that it "can be used to stratify and flag targets for intervention." In other words, your insurance company will be able to generate such scores for all policyholders, and then target low-scoring individuals for some sort of intervention. How long will it be before the decision to write a policy or pay a claim is based in part on this score? Much like the credit score, your insurance company will be able to claim you are a "bad risk", but based on no concrete health conditions like the system is now.
I know that the Constitution only constrains government and not private industry. But that becomes a fig leaf when any corporation can feel free to engage in outrageous violations of our privacy and other traditional rights at their whim. Is it somehow "better" because those violations don't come from the government?
This is outrageous. And I just learned about it from a link in a random internet discussion, not from the Post or the Times or Fox News. Where's the torches and pitchforks?
LINK You just have to see this **** to believe it. FICO claims that with no more than a name and address, they are happy to provide a comprehensive score to your insurance company, doctor or pharmaceutical company that shows how likely you are to adhere to your medication use. They claim to use "retail purchase behavior, geo-credit profiles, and income/wealth indicators" (among other data sources) to produce this number.
They also claim that this process is "HIPAA compliant", yet they also promise to provide this score based on a name and address, so that it "can be used to stratify and flag targets for intervention." In other words, your insurance company will be able to generate such scores for all policyholders, and then target low-scoring individuals for some sort of intervention. How long will it be before the decision to write a policy or pay a claim is based in part on this score? Much like the credit score, your insurance company will be able to claim you are a "bad risk", but based on no concrete health conditions like the system is now.
I know that the Constitution only constrains government and not private industry. But that becomes a fig leaf when any corporation can feel free to engage in outrageous violations of our privacy and other traditional rights at their whim. Is it somehow "better" because those violations don't come from the government?
This is outrageous. And I just learned about it from a link in a random internet discussion, not from the Post or the Times or Fox News. Where's the torches and pitchforks?
