Actiblizzard, other companies are trying to track their employees' pregnancies - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/10/tracking-your-pregnancy-an-app-may-be-more-public-than-you-think/?utm_term=.8828ea5642ea Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room. But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work. “Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said 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. This highlight stands out particularly, Milt Ezzard seriously sounds like a serial killer In 2014, when the company rolled out incentives for workers who tracked their physical activity with a Fitbit, some employees voiced concerns over what they called a privacy-infringing overreach. But as the company offered more health tracking — including for mental health, sleep, diet, autism and cancer care — Ezzard said workers grew more comfortable with the trade-off and enticed by the financial benefits. “Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: ‘You’re prying into our lives,’ ” Ezzard said. “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.” “People’s sensitivity,” he added, “has gone from, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard is Big Brother,’ to, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard really is bringing me tools that can help me out.’ ” “I want them to have a healthy baby because it’s great for our business experience,” Ezzard said. “Rather than having a baby who’s in the neonatal ICU, where she’s not able to focus much on work.”

I'm imagining a version of that Target story where instead of being sent coupons for cribs, she gets fired.

Who the fuck looks at this sentence and thinks to themselves 'yep, this makes me sound totes human'?

it's illegal to do that

He's given up the ghost. CEOs are either psychopaths or at least display the pathology of them, Ezzard is making no attempt to hide that.

This isn't the dystopia I was promised. There are no cyborgs or soylent green, only corporations invading every intimate detail of our lives. There needs to be laws preventing employers from looking for shit like this.

Why do you think they try to find your social accounts, or even try to force you to list them or potentially give access to them? They want every cog in their machine to work "optimally" for as little effort as possible while ready to put them out on the street if they at all are considered unwanted or even a problem for the company. Human employees are little more than statistics in many companies but they still try to act like some stereotypical Big Brother for efficiency.

A sociopath with tenure.

Fucking WHAT? Why is it that employers always find unscrupulous ways to squeeze more work out of their employees?

ya but we also have a right to sue our employers for discrimination, except we don't because of forced arbitration clauses superseding our legal rights

We need to replace all CEOs and executives with managers chosen by their employees, who should own the majority if not all the shares in the companies that they work for. Only then will we finally be able to have corporations that aren't run by complete psychopaths - because psychopaths won't be given that kind of power to the extent that they are now, and if they do somehow get the top job and start making things shit for their employees, they'll get the boot.

Is this really a surprise to anyone? Maternity leave can be a massive sunk cost for any company. Were it not for the prospect of costly discrimination lawsuits and whatnot, you can bet women altogether would be virtually unhirable because of it. Never underestimate the soulless pursuit of cost savings.

I'm honestly convinced that if you built an AI with 0 regard for human life and put it in charge of a corporation with the single goal of "earn as much money as possible" it would be less of a psychopath than most modern CEO's.

Nah, they'll just fire you for another arbitrary reason. So yes, illegal. But that doesn't stop them at all.

Almost certainly because if the AI was programmed correctly it would have: an understanding of the productivity impact of worker morale the ability to think beyond the next quarter earnings report Neither of which are abilities CEOs possess.

I feel like the Cyberpunk age draws closer. Get those neon signs up.

Doesn't mean it won't be done. All they have to do is claim it's a layoff due to business concerns. Or, hell, if it's an at-will state and she's not in a contract, they can just say 'lol we don't want you around any more fuck off' and there's no legal basis to counter that. 'Tis why at-will employment is total cancer. Employers don't even need a reason to give you walkin' papers, they just can. AT any time. On a whim.

I personally cant wait to trade my newborns personal info for hearthstone packs and a WoW subscription. The future is now

The drive for consolidating capital sacrifices the health of everyone used to obtain it.

Don't forget that machines probably won't spend most of that money on vanity projects. Every cent of money that Paperclip Optimizer makes is going to go towards making more money, which will end up helping the company.

It'd also probably have a better grasp of economics than the majority of executives do.

I definitely recommend reading the entire article, it's really interesting. There are also some really shocking parts in it. This sounds so absurd. The app also allows women to report whether they had a miscarriage or pregnancy loss, including the date and “type of loss,” such as whether the baby was stillborn. “After reporting a miscarriage, you will have the option to both reset your account and, when you’re ready, to start a new pregnancy,” the app says.

"I want them to have a healthy human child, and not the zognoid spawn of an egg that I certainly implanted in them, as a human does."