Activision Blizzard pays employees $1 per day to share their pregnancy data

When watching Black Mirror I often think “that’s a bit far-fetched”: but once again the world has proven the show is closer to reality than we’d like, as Activision Blizzard has been encouraging employees to share their health data with the company via third-party apps. Not only that, but the company has explained its practices with some frankly terrifying quotes.

A report by the Washington Post found Activision Blizzard has been incentivising employees to give their data to Ovia Health – an organisation that offers a range of family planning and pregnancy tracking services. Companies can pay Ovia Health to access the aggregate data of their workers, which according to The Washington Post runs from “trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood”.

The information that can be accessed includes how many workers have faced high-risk pregnancies, have given birth prematurely, the medical questions they researched, and the planned length of their maternity leave.

For each day of use, employees reportedly receive a $1 (£0.76) gift card from Activision Blizzard, and the company in turn gets to view the combined anonymous statistics.

Although Activision Blizzard stresses the program is voluntary, the financial incentive has clearly convinced many soon-to-be mothers to share their data, with one employee explaining the bonus helped provide “diaper and formula money”. Activision Blizzard claims the scheme is popular and has saved the company roughly $1200 (£917) per employee in annual medical costs.