Attending a recent online Health Chat by one of the FAANG companies, a software developer referred to a patient’s “digital phenotype”.
A phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment. For example, in biological terms, your observable body weight is a phenotype, which is a function of hundreds or thousands of genes (your genotype) and your environment. So i suspect it is reasonable to assume that our digital phenotype is how a corporation sees us.
And what is our digital phenotype composed of? Millions of bits of out data—our “digital genotype”.
Now, intellectually, I think it’s pretty fascinating that with enough data—my data plus hundreds of millions of other people’s data, a big digital genotype soup—our digital phenotypes, including our actions and behaviors both on and offline, can be predicted.
But I don’t think this is a good thing.
Just because industry can do something (technically and/or legally), doesn’t mean they ought to do something.