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Without much fanfare, Verily, Alphabet’s Life Sciences unit, has launched Coefficient Insurance. With Google’s intimate knowledge of our daily patterns, contacts and dreams, the search engine group has for years had a far better picture of risk than any insurer. That Coefficient Insurance would initially focus on the area of stop-loss insurance to protect employers from staff health cost volatility should not obscure its ambitious agenda for the rest of the industry. This is not the first case of a big technology company trying to disrupt the healthcare industry. Not all of these endeavours are equally troublesome; some might even be laudable. Yet, Alphabet’s latest move, shrouded in the rhetoric of reducing the burden on the healthcare system by empowering employees with data about their lifestyles — is likely to prove problematic.
One would need to be extremely naive to believe that a more extensive digital surveillance system is likely to benefit the weak and the poor. Some good might come out of it — a healthier workplace, maybe — but we should also inquire who would bear the cost of this digital utopia.
Privacy law does not offer an adequate solution either. Under pressure from employers, most workers acquiesce to being monitored. This was obvious even before Alphabet’s foray into insurance, as plenty of smaller players have been pitching employers sophisticated workplace surveillance systems as a way of lowering healthcare costs.
Healthcare insurance is a microcosm of the wider problem with the governance of digital society. In today’s unequal digital society, power accrues to those who already have too much of it. Instead of founding institutions that could help the most vulnerable people to better shoulder the risks of digitisation, political parties still hand over the responsibility for taming the tech giants to the technocratic regulators with their existing frameworks, such as antitrust and data protection.
This strategy, after a decade of fits and starts, has failed to bear fruit.