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The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee's hand. [...]
What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.
[...] "People ask me; 'Are you chipped?' and I say; 'Yes, why not,'" said Fredric Kaijser, the 47-year-old chief experience officer at Epicenter. "And they all get excited about privacy issues and what that means and so forth. And for me it's just a matter of I like to try new things and just see it as more of an enabler and what that would bring into the future."
The implants have become so popular that Epicenter workers stage monthly events where attendees have the option of being "chipped" for free.
Full article here:
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/start-up-epicenter-implants-employees-with-microchips.html
AC: There are so many things wrong with both the article and with those people I wouldn't know where to start.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:46PM
I don't think he meant he is blaming socialized medicine.
I think he meant that a common good was able to be used to provide cover for chipping the populace.
It could be welfare payments, disability, alimony, or tax refunds. Whenever a tracking mechanism is introduced unnecessarily under the cover of some other good, it is not out-of-hand to be wary as to why it was introduced when it was not a requirement.
Just because it is free and convenient doesn't make it good; couple that with peer pressure events and soon all of the uncool people aren't chipped and they don't deserve welfare because they are freeloaders that need to take drug tests to get food stamps and demonstrate they can work or what have you.
Maybe he was blaming socialized medicine as a cause of ills and that this is just another aspect to it, but my take on it is that a large benefit enjoyed by the masses (whether he agrees with the entitlement or not) was used as cover and leverage to install individual beacons into people that can be used with the existing trackers that already persist throughout much of the civilized world.
RFID readers are common, and their range is pretty good and can be extended throughout the public infrastructure and shopping malls and highway streetlights and toll road passes and so on without any inconvenience to those being tracked--in fact, with less inconveniences, since some sort of benefit is usually thrown in to entice people to be willingly tracked.
I don't think changing the argument about how the issue isn't socialized medicine helps address the reason as to why chipping is OK since it lets people wave their hands to get soft serve ice cream despite the stuff they can't see going on--but I also agree that it isn't socialized medicine that is causing the harms I see happening. It's just a conduit leveraged in a society that is accepting of it.
And, maybe he does blame it. I would have chosen a different method of introduction, but the point is valid that this common good, that can cause split opinions, is being used to fuel my own paranoias about what is done with that chip after its implanted.
More paranoid people might not go for checkups. I can't microwave my hand after its implantation, and I didn't read the article to learn how people are removing the RFID after they have left the company, and what reasonable precautions are taken with their location data, and if they are allowed access to all of the recorded sightings of their beacon/RFID chip etc. I expect there is little in regards to that overall, since waving hands for ice cream is pretty cool and personal responsibility for data security is not.