Today, mandatory RFID microchips for humans are still a distant and creepy possible future, with a handful of tech-trendy volunteers trying to revolutionize use of the icon of the tracked and traced society.
Many see microchips becoming not only mandatory under an Orwellian super-surveillance state – but utterly indispensable to modern life, as dozens of hard-to-remember passwords, payments and transactions for online business and leisure become not just commonplace but overwhelming and pervasive. The chip might become too necessary not to take.
How will you keep track of all your online keys, and how will they know you are who you say you are?
It may someday soon become so essential to online, data-driven life – filled with authentications and location-based and secure user-specific applications – that few will resist taking the chip… despite the warnings in prophecy and by modern day privacy advocates.
A number of brave new technerds are chipping themselves to go boldly into the biometric future. And the trend is becoming more popular:
Worldwide some 2,000 people have been ‘chipped’ and their number is growing. Oudennarden expects their number to grow considerably next year, particularly among what he calls ‘technerds’.
Martijn Wismeijer, who has had two chips in his hand for a couple of weeks, says the pain was over after a couple of days. ‘You can still feel them, but you forget they are there,’ he said. He uses one chip as a savings account for bitcoins – which he says is the safest way to keep them. The chip on his other hand stores the passwords for 900 websites. ‘Many people use the same password for everything but I think that is a bad habit,’ he says.
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