Imagine it. You and your husband finally start to discuss the possibility of starting your family. You are nervous and excited, and know that you are just starting the first steps, but you decide to stop taking your monthly birth control pills. Or you decide to do an innocent Google search about fertility. Next thing you know, your bosses are looking at you differently and your email inbox is getting anonymous information about pregnancy. How in the world does your boss seem to know your life plans before you even know them yourself? This seems like an embarrassing going-to-school-in-your-underwear kind of dream, but for some women, this has become a reality.

In an attempt to control rising healthcare costs, some companies have resorted to hiring outside firms that use "big data" collection to mine data about employees' prescription drug use, credit scores, and other personal information in an attempt to predict individual health needs and a person's ability to pay for health services. For example, these companies will mine personal information about a person to determine if they are at risk for diabetes, and then send them personalized messages containing information such as weight-loss programs.

I'm sure by now some are thinking, "Hold the phone, invasion of privacy?" while others are thinking, "Chill out, it is for their own good."

While the practice of personal data collection has raised red flags about privacy concerns in the past, some companies have recently taken their data mining to a new level. These firms being hired to collect individual health data have now launched a new product that will scan insurance claims to find out which female employees have stopped filling birth control prescriptions, or have made any fertility-related searches on a health app. This data is then matched with data about the employee's age and, if applicable, age of her children to see the likelihood that she could become pregnant.

I'm sorry, what?!

These employers are using outside firms to scan personal health information to attempt to predict the likelihood that there is a chance that their employee could be trying to become pregnant? I personally don't care what reason they supply for wanting to know this information, any information as intimate and private as the decision to start a family is not one that I would ever want to be sharing with my husband and my boss. This large-scale data mining is a direct breach of personal privacy. Federal health-privacy laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, generally bar employers from collecting personal health information, but the employers simply enter into a contract with outside firms that have access to this private information. It is both disgusting and terrifying that employers have access to this kind of information about each and every employee, and it frankly makes me nervous to have to enter into the workforce one day.

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