Activision pays employees to track pregnancies via health app
Activision Blizzard pays female employees to enter data about their fertility and pregnancy into the health app Ovia. Employees who voluntarily choose to participate in this will receive a daily gift card worth one dollar.
The data that the female employees can enter in the Ovia app range from the status of bodily functions, medication use, mood, to sex drive. Once the baby is born, information can also be entered such as the child’s name, location and whether there were any complications with the birth, The Washington Post writes. The data is anonymized and presented as statistics, although experts fear that in the workplace it may be possible to link the data to individual employees.
According to the paper, companies use the app by paying developer Ovia Health for a special version of the app. The entered health data is thus forwarded in anonymised form to an internal employer website that is available to human resource employees. Companies that use this would encourage employees to enter as much data about their bodies and health as possible.
Milt Ezzard, a vice president of Activision Blizzard, attributes Ovia’s adoption to a changing workplace culture, where the voluntary sharing of sensitive information would have become more common. In 2014, the game company started encouraging Fitbit users to track their physical activity, including sleep activity and diet. Some employees would have complained that this affects privacy, but according to Ezzard, employees have become more accustomed to this exchange over time, given the financial benefits.
Ezzard argues that maternity programs like Ovia’s help the company excel in a competitive industry and help retain and return skilled women. “I want them to have a healthy baby because it’s great for our business experience.” He says that’s preferable to the situation where the baby ends up in the “neonatal intensive care unit and the mother is barely able to focus on work.”
The vice president says his company previously used company nurses to periodically phone pregnant women to ask how they were doing. He says shifting some of this maternity care to an app that allows women to share data much more directly has made a big difference. Ezzard says nearly 20 women who were first diagnosed with infertility have become pregnant after Activision Blizzard started offering Ovia’s fertility app.
An Ovia spokesperson has said that the company does not sell aggregated data for advertising purposes. However, The Washington Post points out that users must agree to the terms of use, which contain a provision that gives Ovia an “infinite, irrevocable, and universal right to use, reproduce, distribute, modify, display, communicate to the public or otherwise use and exploit.