Selling your health

Selling your health
Freemium companies like Google and Amazon profit from customers using their services by collecting personal information contained within our files, searches, emails, and shopping habits. The model is popular with young people who generally feel they have no need of privacy and are loath to pay for products they don't have to. The model has made the jump to the health sector in the form of fitness and health tracking programs and hardware accessories; but what is being done by these entrepreneurs to safeguard this extremely personal data and how is it then being used to profile and target you?
Companies like FitBit, Jawbone, and Samsung now sell bracelets and watches meant to track your activities throughout the day. These inexpensive toys can measure information like blood pressure, heart rate, and sleep habits before sending it to a web/phone app where the information is viewed (sometimes with a report on how to change ones lifestyle). Contractually most of these companies have the right to all the data gathered by the applications. This data can then be sold for research, ad targeting, or simply to expand the volume of information stored on a person. While it is doubtful any company has immediate plans for the data, it is indicative of the trend of ever increasing data collection on users in the hopes that the data may at some point be used to better sell you some product.
Selling your health is not only subject to popular trends such as the activity bracelets but also extends to the genetics industry. Companies like 23andMe, DNAancestry, and deCODEgenetics provide services for finding family and lineage while others like Gene by Gene provide paternity tests and others still like Gene Planet look for susceptibility to disease. As sequencing has become cheaper and quicker these services have become much more popular and available with prices ranging anywhere from around $1000 to as low as $100. The affordability of some of these services comes with the price of selling the companies rights to your genetic code. This is still a murky area legally, with the pharmaceutical industry pushing for the right to patent genetic sequences. These could then be used to develop gene therapies for certain illnesses. The goal of curing disease is undoubtedly noble but giving a company full control over one's genetic makeup certainly smacks of distopian scifi. This is without also taking into account that companies are woefully inept at securing user data knowing the damage a hacker can perpetrate with a simple credit card number or password.