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Smartphone cradle used to cheat “10k steps/day” health insurance discounts
- walrus01 9y agosimilar but different, a manual labor app store rating farm: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zHQqznuFPd6EO1ryjV2Zlc6MSxY=/0x146:439x439/920x613/filters:focal(0x146:439x439)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/45675836/53899d01jw1eovdjy4jmgj20hs0npaeh.0.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zHQqznuFPd6EO1ryjV2Zlc6MSxY=...
- saagarjha 9y agoThis would presumably work as long as your insurance provider doesn't have access to your location or any other means of figuring out that your exercise routine is odd.
- craftyguy 9y agoYou could claim you were on a treadmill
- saagarjha 9y agoRight, in the middle of a Harbin restaurant where a bunch of other people like to also seem to like "running on the treadmill".
- Johnny555 9y ago"You see, so many people are in to exercise that the restaurant started offering treadmill tables". Though probably more believable to just hang out in the gym lobby with your laptop or a book while your watch does its exercise routine,.
- williamscales 9y agoPerhaps there's a gym on the second floor!
- oldcynic 9y agoAs odd as "I like to run on the spot when watching Netflix"
- kps 9y agoWhat the world needs is an app that enables our kind to hire some peon to walk around with our phones. Where do I send my YC application?
- chatmasta 9y agoNot exactly what you describe, but SXSW paid a platoon of homeless Austin residents to carry around WiFi access points. IIRC it didn’t go over so well for them in the media, which I personally found odd since they were paying $20/hr and the homeless people probably thought it was a cool way to earn easy money...
- wufufufu 9y agoMaybe if you're smart enough to do that, you're smart enough to care about your health in other ways and thus you should still fit into the price model that the insurance company uses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- xd1936 9y agoSmart people ≠ healthy people
- ikeboy 9y agoThere's a strong correlation between IQ and life expectancy, possibly mostly genetic
- Retric 9y agoIt's also likely the other direction, with health growing up resulting in higher IQ.
- ikeboy 9y agoFor insurance purposes if you can learn someone's IQ without learning their health status you still get evidence about their future health
- acdha 9y agoIQ historically has had a strong correlation with social status and affluence, which also implies access to healthcare, ability to eat a balanced diet or go to the gym, etc.
- bluGill 9y agoMy guess is it is childhood. I see poor people eating junk food all the time and feed that to their kids - the kids are fat on empty calories and so the brain doesn't get what it needs to grow smart. That is just a guess though. I don't have the ability to verify it.
- kpwags 9y agoI wonder how many people use stuff like this to cheat the system? I remember seeing someone on reddit bragging about attaching their Fitbit to a reciprocating saw to get more steps than his wife. I couldn't figure out why it was that important, but with insurance discounts, I can definitely see the financial incentives.
- ams6110 9y agoA lot. I'd be surprised if any Business Management 101 class didn't teach that if there is a reward involved, people will maximize for whatever critera you measure.
- eli 9y agoGoodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- dragonwriter 9y agoThat's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.
- pmichaud 9y agoI agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.
- eli 9y agoWhat's an example of a metric that measures the true merit of something?
- 9y ago
- emodendroket 9y agoWellness programs and similar initiatives are so repellent to me that I'm pretty sympathetic to everyone fooling them.
- darkstar999 9y agoWhy?
- emodendroket 9y agoBecause I dislike the idea of insurance companies nosing in on my private life and telling me how to spend my time. I'm sure someone will object that participation is voluntary, but I expect it to go along the familiar voluntary with perks -> penalties if not participating -> outright mandatory progression.
- acdha 9y agoI also expect that ratchet effect where the goals will increase over time without considering other factors such as whether people are paid enough to afford to have reasonable commute times, access to healthy food, etc. Software engineers have higher pay and greater ability to walk if management gets too patronizing; a lot of other people are going to get this as the alternative to big insurance increases but not, say, getting a more flexible schedule or paid enough to spend an hour less commuting or be able to afford healthier food at inner city markets where vegetables cost more than at the Whole Foods further out.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI also have a stubbornness gene in me that encourages me to spitefully resist all attempts to meddle in my lifestyle by sanctimonious blowhards that couldn't care less about my actual well being. The last contact I had with such a voluntary insurance program, it consisted entirely of the insured calling in to a call center, to have someone nag them to create health goals and then nag more to make progress. No thanks; I'm already married. I could have just blathed my way through to collect the cash reward at the end, but I decided I didn't want to feed that system with my attention, and opted out. Later iterations haven't seemed any better, and I too fear the "voluntary" -> "economically enforced" -> "mandatory" progression. If you want me to walk 10k steps every day, the cash reward might be enough to reflect the lower claims paid out to frequent walkers, but it won't even begin to cover the excess cortisol, expressed because I can't stand the thought of my insurance company electronically monitoring my every move and judging me based on how much I can manage. (Genealogical anecdotes suggest the stubbornness is Scottish in origin. The "go boil your head" temperament is strongly associated with a specific family name, traceable back to Edinburgh.)
- Steltek 9y agoI bike 15+ miles a day but my work's discount program doesn't "support" biking. If I was into vigilante justice, I'd consider a solution like this too. But as it is, I'm quite content biking for my own sake rather than some pittance of a benefit.
- Johnny555 9y agoWhen my friend was in a corporate fitness challenge, he strapped the company-issued pedometer on his ankle to get credit for his biking. Not sure if he told the company that he did that, but his team won the competition.
- liveoneggs 9y agoare you more likely to sustain an injury than someone who is mostly idle?
- 8ytecoder 9y agoDo you have statistics to indicate biking is inherently more dangerous than other activities or are you just repeating a certain assumption you have?
- stochastic_monk 9y agoLots of runners in my family. They often get injuries (especially knew) from running. Biking is a lot kinder to your joints.
- jimmy1 9y agoI rarely bike because I don't trust drivers, and you can't bike on the sidewalk.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoPeople who use bikes don't trust drivers either. In fact I work on the base assumption that bus drivers in particular, are actively trying to kill me.
- forgueam 9y agoI did something similar in college. A company paid cash for installing software that displayed ads on the bottom of your monitor. It qualified your ad viewing activity based on mouse movement. At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month
- vanadium 9y agoI remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum. I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.
- jtreminio 9y agoThere were programs that would run up the 40 hour weekly limit in seconds. I'm assuming AllAdvantage had no real sanity checking when receiving data, which to my eyes means they deserved to go out the way they did.
- Trav5 9y agoIt was a game. The sanity checks were added and workarounds were formed...
- Dave_TRS 9y agoAllAdvantage was great while it lasted. My method as a highschooler was a free mouse trembler app, coupled with 4 rotating Geocities sites I made to auto-forwarded to each other in a loop every 45 seconds.
- pmorici 9y agolol I remember AllAdvantage; I had a set of programmable Legos and I made a little jig that would sit there and spin a wheel under the mouse ball back and forth.
- 9y ago
- borntyping 9y agoI'm sure I've something similar come up a few times recently, but never with any source discussing the health insurance plans that supposedly collect this data. Has anyone come across anything on these insurance plans? I'm sure it's something many companies would love to do but I remain skeptical.
- BrentOzar 9y agoI've seen folks wrap their step tracker in a couple pairs of socks, then either throw it in the dryer, or tie the socks to a ceiling fan on low. Those particular folks called it "going jogging."
- moscovium 9y agoI'm so glad these incentives have contributed to expediting the eventual heat death of our universe
- daviross 9y agoTo be fair, you posting this comment also contributed to expediting the eventual heat death of the universe, so.
- Caprinicus 9y agoFortunately he has fit bits on all 10 fingers so it wasn’t a waste
- otakucode 9y agoWhat you measure - you optimize. They measured cellphone shaking. They got optimized cellphone shaking. I will also share another famous quotation of mine which I intend to eventually get tattooed somewhere (when I can figure out how to make it look good.. I have no tattoos): "Make game of that which makes as much as thee." - from The Rubiyat by Omar Khayaam.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoOmar Khayyam Great quote. But you probably know, that the English translation is more inspired by Omar, and much of what you enjoyed was the work of FitzGerald. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5165263/The-Rubaiyat-of-Omar-Khayyam-by-Edward-FitzGerald.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/516526... Full Quote: “But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me The Quarrel of the Universe let be: And, in some corner of the Hubbub couch'd, Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.”
- otakucode 9y agoI originally found the quote in a computer science book, and it interested me enough to seek out The Rubiyat to read. The version I found (online I believe) was actually a translation of several different versions of the work I believe? I'm not sure who the translator was. The quote in particular was only present in one of the 'versions' of the work. I imagine translating poetry, of all things, would be tremendously difficult, but as I don't know many other languages I had to take what I could get. Regardless of source, I think the quote is very insightful and stupendously relevant in todays world that seeks to reduce all people to an easily manipulable optimized factor in a rigid system. Viewing those systems as a game to optimize in turn seems the only rational course.
- 49bc 9y agoThe Wells Fargo effect: if you optimize for a number, you’ll get that number.
- charleyma 9y agoI've always found that anytime time a financial outcome is tied to some sort of behavior incentive, weird behaviors come out. This especially comes out in sales, where whether you like it or not, individuals will typically optimize for the best financial outcome, which is not always explicitly connected to what's best for the company.
- mjcl 9y ago"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- fabianhjr 9y agoThere is also the Cobra effect as a subset of unexpected outcomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- partiallypro 9y agoI much prefer the German word for it, "Verschlimmbesserung."
- _jal 9y agoCongrats, you've learned the Secret of Management. From here on out, your career consists of optimizing methods of manipulating that effect for your benefit, the benefit of your team, and the benefit of your company, in that order.
- consto 9y agoMetrics exist to be cheated. For better or for worse.
- jonahhorowitz 9y agoThe obvious defect in this device is that it doesn't charge your phone while it walks it for you.
- donttrack 9y agoNext up: GPS cradles to proxy your driving habits into granddaddy mode to get cheap car insurance.
- camhenlin 9y agoIt seems like the additional miles added might defeat the purpose
- lev99 9y agoYeah, but spoofing GPS is possible. The black box insurance gadgets typically wire directly into a car, so it'll be harder send fake data from that pipeline, but totally possible. The benefit would come from smoothing extremes. Lie about speeds over 80, reduce big accelerations and hard breaking. Lieing about total miles could also work, but I think that could be done by just unplugging the box, or only sending it power and not data.
- _s 9y ago"Black Box" car insurance already exists :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dogruck 9y agoIt always makes me smile when I see the hoard of people proudly step forward, and boast, “oh yes, here are examples of how I’ve cheated various systems!!” Which is fine. That’s human nature. But. No shame.
- ryandrake 9y agoNot sure I see anything shameful here. More like clever. I’m reminded of that guy[1] who earned tons of airline miles by taking advantage of an ill-thought-out pudding promotion. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur...
- dogruck 9y agoClever and unethical aren’t disjoint. Lotta clever thieves and scammers.
- onetimemanytime 9y agoserious question: is it insurance fraud?
- notanai 9y agoOne day all of us have to do stuff like this to keep up.
- trumped 9y agoCan some AI do it for me?
- intrasight 9y agoThese program will all be illegal at the end of the year anyway, so don't invest much in hacks.
- _jal 9y agoI certainly hope so. Fuck that, the insurer chosen by my company doesn't get to be this intrusive with me. I simply do not trust them. My current insurance hasn't tried this yet, but I'm sure they will. They're going to hate me by the time I get done redlining the agreement and sending it back, and that's just for starters. We are going to see a ton of tertiary effects of all this data sloshing around, and I really don't think people are going to like them. Especially wrt insurance and invasive surveillance like this. To drive, the state requires it, and so any time-and-place data and so on will be effectively legally required to be shared under whatever terms insurance companies choose.
- avhon1 9y agoDo you have a source on that? Also, what country?
- intrasight 9y agoBest thing is to google "ada aarp eeoc gina" for timeframe of last few months. An example https://www.provanthealth.com/industry-trends/2018/3/26/whats-happening-with-aarp-vs-eeoc-on-march-30 https://www.provanthealth.com/industry-trends/2018/3/26/what... "In the fall of 2016, the AARP brought suit on behalf of its members, arguing that the ADA and GINA regulations are inconsistent with Congress’s statutory requirement that employers’ wellness programs be “voluntary.” The AARP argued its members were injured by being forced to pay higher health insurance costs to avoid disclosing personal health information. In the fall of 2017, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment to the AARP, holding that, although the term “voluntary” was ambiguous in the ADA’s and GINA’s statutes, the EEOC’s interpretation of the term was not supported by a reasoned explanation and therefore was not entitled to the Court’s deference." http://www.psfinc.com/articles/aarp-vs-eeoc-lawsuit-update-still-no-clarity/ http://www.psfinc.com/articles/aarp-vs-eeoc-lawsuit-update-s... "If the current court order stands, wellness programs may not be allowed to tie incentives to wellness programs subject to the ADA or GINA."
- clarkmoody 9y agoEconTalk from three weeks ago was The Tyranny of Metrics[1] about how when metrics are tied to compensation, they often have disastrous consequences, even to the point of achieving the opposite of the desired effect. [1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.htm...
- dghughes 9y agoI was using the Samsung Health app not for insurance just for personal reasons. I was doing well most days I waked a minimum of 10,000 steps or so I thought. So I opened up the app to find it was not working because it had updated and I had to agree to new terms first. :(
- diiaann 9y agoMy uncle in China had a seat belt chime defeater that also doubled as a bottle opener.
- DonHopkins 9y agoHerbie Hancock and Jim Whiting rocked it in 1984! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockit_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockit_(song) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHhD4PD75zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHhD4PD75zY
- CosmicShadow 9y agoFunny enough, my wife works at an insurance company that has "walking stations" where you can work while on a treadmill and the fitbit doesn't detect steps that way unless you remove it from your wrist and jam it in your belt or bra, which doesn't always work when the walk stations are not private.