Diana Diller, 39, of Los Angeles used the Ovia app to log daily updates when she was pregnant with her daughter, Simone. The aggregated data she filed to Ovia was shared with her employer.
But Ovia also has become a powerful monitoring tool for employers and health insurers, which under the banner of corporate wellness have aggressively pushed to gather more data about their workers’ lives than ever before. “What could possibly be the most optimistic, best-faith reason for an employer to know how many high-risk pregnancies their employees have? So they can put more brochures in the break room?” asked Karen Levy, a Cornell University assistant professor who has researched family and workplace monitoring.
The rise of pregnancy-tracking apps shows how some companies increasingly view the human body as a technological gold mine, rich with a vast range of health data their algorithms can track and analyze. Women’s bodies have been portrayed as especially lucrative: The consulting firm Frost & Sullivan said the “femtech” market — including tracking apps for women’s menstruation, nutrition and sexual wellness — could be worth as much as $50 billion by 2025.
“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.” Ovia’s corporate deals with employers and insurers have seen “triple-digit growth” in recent years, Wallace said. The company would not say how many firms it works with, but the number of employees at those companies is around 10 million, a statistic Ovia refers to as “covered lives.”
For employers who fund workers’ health insurance, pregnancy can be one of the biggest and most unpredictable health-care expenses. In 2014, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong defended the company’s cuts to retirement benefits by blaming the high medical expenses that arose from two employees giving birth to “distressed babies.”
Ovia’s soft pastels and cheery text lend a friendly air to the process of transmitting private health information to one’s employer, and the app gives daily nudges to remind women to log their progress with messages such as, “You’re beautiful! How are you feeling today?”
Or not. Media BS hysteria.
Can’t get a second of privacy these days!