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Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash
Technologist | Ethicist | Strategist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyawadhwa/

Singapore is a country of rooftop pools, high-tech solutions, and universal healthcare. It's no surprise that Apple and the Singapore government have partnered in a national, two-year health initiative called LumiHealth. LumiHealth will use the health metrics tracked on the Apple Watch and interactive games on the iPhone app to reward healthy behavior financially. Thankfully, according to Apple, all user data will be encrypted and will not be sold for marketing purposes.

Revolutionizing health on a large scale through wearable technology is an exciting prospect. Honestly, as a former cycling instructor, this sounds like heaven on earth. However, I have a few questions:

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post-2018 iPhone
Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash
Technologist | Ethicist | Strategist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyawadhwa/

It's no secret that companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google utilize user data to target users with ads and monitor their behaviors. Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard professor and philosopher, writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that "My will and yours threaten the flow of surveillance revenues. Its aim is not to destroy us but to author us and profit from that authorship." Infringement on your or my free will is a chilling prospect, but Shoshana is right. The easier it is for big tech companies to influence our behaviors, the more they can profit (it feels parasitic).

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