Employers and insurance administrators are tracking your spending

Employers and insurance administrators are tracking spending data to build a profile of the kind of food you eat, the size of clothes you wear, and more.

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but the whole thing stinks of Big Brother to me. “Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina recently began buying spending data on more than 3 million people in its employer group plans,” The Wall Street Journal  reports. “If someone, say, purchases plus-size clothing, the health plan could flag him for potential obesity—and then call or send mailings offering weight-loss solutions.”

There are some things that are voluntary invasion of privacy, like where you decide to go on Facebook and put your life out there. But an employer having its contractor spy on what you buy, where you go, what you eat? That has a full creep-out factor to me.

How can you be sure employers won’t use info about your religion, or your taste in music, or whatever it is about your out of the office lifestyle against you? Your employer could be monitoring anything about you and decide they don’t like it.

We say we value privacy, but do we? When somebody without our permission starts developing a dossier on us, that isn’t OK.