The Shared Value group of insurers, which includes the South African company Discovery and its product VitalityDrive, claims to change "individual behaviour through incentives for fitness and healthy eating." Beneath the inspiring words is a clear-eyed focus on what Discovery calls "the behavioral nature of risk." Once insurers' risk becomes defined as principally about the insured's ongoing behavior (not occasional accidents), the relationship of insurer to insured becomes one that requires tracking. But do insurers' commercial interests really make them good life trainers? There are signs—even in the United States, which leads this development—that many now find this particular type of trade-off unacceptable. Unacceptable or not, data relations are already becoming for many a compulsory dimension of both labor and life.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 421