It's not so much health insurance companies I'm worried about, as they will probably have access to medical information about their clients anyway, and organisations like BUPA probably do take patient confidentiality seriously.
I'm more concerned about other forms of insurance, and about links to people related to you and not you personally. For example, what if people start getting a higher car insurance quote because someone in their household had an alcohol problem a few years ago? What if parents start getting refused life insurance because someone's sibling died young from an unlucky genetic problem?
Plus there are the obvious concerns if employers or their representatives/trade bodies can get hold of this kind of data and discriminate in dubious ways when making hiring decisions (sorry, we don't hire anyone who ever had a drug problem, even if they've been clean for a decade), media people going after celebrities/politicians/crime victims (that rape victim was obviously a slut, look at the two STIs she's had in the past five years), and so on.
I agree, except for the last one, which I'm not concerned about - in an open/transparent society, such "problems" (slut/drug abuser/B&D/...) would not be considered problems any more, but only "life phases"/"exploration periods"/"lifestyles" - after all, when everybody is "weird" in one way or another, nobody is really weird any more.
It's only the commercial exploitation I'm worried about - it has a lot of potential to meaningfully impact human lives, usually for the worse, and often because of things said humans have no influence on.
Though for those living in totalitarian/fascist societies (e.g. gays in Putin's Russia) have much better reasons to be concerned.
I'm more concerned about other forms of insurance, and about links to people related to you and not you personally. For example, what if people start getting a higher car insurance quote because someone in their household had an alcohol problem a few years ago? What if parents start getting refused life insurance because someone's sibling died young from an unlucky genetic problem?
Plus there are the obvious concerns if employers or their representatives/trade bodies can get hold of this kind of data and discriminate in dubious ways when making hiring decisions (sorry, we don't hire anyone who ever had a drug problem, even if they've been clean for a decade), media people going after celebrities/politicians/crime victims (that rape victim was obviously a slut, look at the two STIs she's had in the past five years), and so on.