With all the talk about surveillance we’ve done in this course, I figured this would be an appropriate clip to show. This clip (Microchip Implants) talks about how everything is becoming more digitized, and in a few years everyone will have chips implanted in them, which upon scanning will be able to divulge personal information, financial information, medical information, and basically your entire life in a single scan. It also discussed new facial recognition technology which police will be able to use to track criminals. Facebook actually introduced similar face recognition technology to a lot of negative criticism and privacy groups, because they felt it was a violation of peoples rights. The benefits that would come with such technologies would be tempting to anyone. Who wouldn’t want to have more affective methods of catching criminals (besides criminals themselves), the amount of man hours and money that would be saved would be phenomenal and all that money and time could be allocated towards other tasks, increasing overall productivity. How great would it be if people would no longer have to carry keys or cash and could just open and pay for everything with a finger swipe? Crimes like robbery would go way down and people’s general sense of security would rise. Of course there are the security issues, there are people who do not see the benefits of this technology and just view it as another method of government surveillance and tracking. All of that information could and probably would be stored somewhere, and could be potentially used against you, may it be something as innocent as advertising or something as sinister as blackmail.
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I can’t say that the idea doesn’t sound convenient. The idea of never having to carry keys and a wallet sounds wonderful. Gone forever would be the hassle of losing a credit card, a driver’s license, or say, a Baruch student ID. The possibilities of identification could be endless. There would be no more con-artists, no more Jane or John Does, nor as many missing persons even. Children and the mentally ill could be more closely monitored, at less risk for becoming unknown in the event of becoming lost, or worse.
The potential for fraud, however, seems enormous. I can only imagine to what lengths someone with sinister intentions would have to go through to get a bank account number, or access to a house or car. Your body would become part of your property, in a sense. In order for someone to gain access to your home or savings account, they would need access to what would be your (presumably lifeless, no one likes witnesses) body. And what’s not to say these microchips could not be somehow duplicated? There is no ingenuity like that of the black market.
On another note, I don’t like what such a technology would do to the body. It would objectify it, mechanize it, and degrade it even, to a set of numbers and personal information that anyone with a scanner can read. This takes away some very natural rights, among them the right to privacy and anonymity, both violated daily with every technological advent.