Microchips in Humans: Consumer-Friendly App, or New Frontier in Surveillance?

In 2021, a British/Polish firm known as Walletmor announced that it had become the first company to sell implantable payment microchips to everyday consumers. While the first microchip was implanted into a human way back in 1998, says the BBC News—so long ago it might as well be the Dark Ages in the world of computing—it is only recently that the technology has become commercially available (Latham 2022). People are voluntarily having these chips—technically known as “radio frequency identification chips” (RFIDs)—injected under their skin, because these microscopic chips of silicon allow them to pay for purchases at a brick and mortar store just by hovering their hand over a scanner at a checkout counter, entirely skipping the use of any kind of a credit card, debit card, or cell phone app.