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Bye-bye swipe cards: Office workers in Sweden now get chip implants

In a first, an office complex in Sweden offers employees the option of trading in their swipe cards for an embedded RFID chip.

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A rice grain-sized RFID chip that can be implanted into the palm of your hand.
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In a bid to rid themselves of that pesky swipe card and cumbersome thumb scanner, workers at an office complex in Sweden now have the option of getting themselves tagged. RFID tagged, that is.

Employees get a tiny chip the size of a grain of rice implanted into their hands, which contains encoded information that enables them to go about tasks like gaining access to doors and using office printers by just a swipe of their hands. This is a pilot project that will help the chip’s developers determine how they can extend its functionality going forward, like logging into computers or paying for lunch at the office cafeteria, for example.

The Stockholm office of Sime--an organization that hosts technology conferences--is one of the first to actively involve its employees in such a program. Sweden’s propensity to push the envelope on cutting-edge technology implementations dates farther back when last year at a Sime technology conference, 50 members of a Swedish biohackers group called BioNyfiken offered themselves to undergo a similar RFID tag implant procedure.

 

 

Of course the choice to allow technology to invade one’s body on such an intimate level is one that most people would balk at. But for first movers and inveterate geeks, this is serious street-cred boosting stuff. On a more pragmatic level, the ability to carry around all of your key information literally on your person is certainly convenient. In this age of having to authenticate one’s self to tens of connected services over the course of a typical day--social networks, banking websites, physical access to offices and homes--not having to remember a host of passwords is undoubtedly a boon. The idea of RFID was mooted on a large scale ever since 2009, when the first Obamacare act (officially the Affordable Care Act, for American citizens) saw light. In the time since, there have been polarizing opinions on whether human implants should even be considered.

But ethical and privacy implications aside, the question really is: how willing are we to cross over this significant threshold from human to technologically-augmented human?

 

Would you be willing to get yourself implanted with a chip? in DNA India Polls on LockerDome

 

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