Wellness Surveillance: Trackers, Insurance, and the Employee's Body

The modern showcase of corporate paternalism is the wellness program. Its logic is twofold: genuine concern for health and, at the same time, an intrusion into the private sphere.

Care that cuts costs

When a company encourages exercise, tracks steps through fitness trackers, or regulates smoking or diet, it may genuinely reduce risks and insurance costs. Herein lies its strength: the employer's interest and the employee's health partly coincide.

Privacy and autonomy

But wearable devices in wellness programs raise pressing questions of privacy, data security, and autonomy (Navigating Workplace Wellness in the Age of Big Data, JSPG; eHealth and Privacy in U.S. Employer Wellness Programs, Springer). A legal analysis of the risks of wearables at work can be found at Akerman.

Surveillance and well-being

The empirical evidence links monitoring to worse well-being: according to the APA Work in America survey (2023), employees aware of digital surveillance report a negative impact of work on their mental health markedly more often than those who are not monitored. Care experienced as surveillance works against its own purpose.

The selective paternalism of platforms

A separate line of research describes the selective paternalism of algorithmic well-being platforms, which reward some lifestyles and penalize others (The Algorithmisation of Well-Being, Springer). Health becomes a metric, and the metric an instrument of management.

Where the line runs

The condition of voluntariness is critical: large incentives or penalties turn an "optional" program into a mandatory one, and the unavailability of devices creates a two-tier system. Opt-in with moderate incentives preserves autonomy; penalties and the wholesale collection of individual metrics destroy it. The difference between care and control here lies in whether the employee can say "no" without a price.