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Function Creep in Wellness

Meaning

Function creep in wellness describes the gradual, incremental expansion of the original, explicitly consented purpose for which an individual’s health and biometric data were initially collected, leading to its subsequent use for secondary, unanticipated, or unauthorized applications. For instance, heart rate data collected for fitness tracking might later be repurposed for insurance risk assessment or marketing of unrelated health products. This subtle erosion of the data-use boundary poses a significant and often unseen threat to individual privacy and autonomy in the digital health space.