This company embeds microchips in its employees, and they love it
This company embeds microchips in its employees, and they
love it
Last August, 50 employees at Three Square Market got RFID
chips in their hands. Now 80 have them.
by Rachel Metz August 17, 2018
When Patrick McMullan wants a Diet Dr Pepper while he’s
at work, he pays for it with a wave of his hand. McMullan has a microchip
implanted between his thumb and forefinger, and the vending machine immediately
deducts money from his account. At his office, he’s one of dozens of employees
who have been doing likewise for a year now.
McMullan is the president of Three Square Market, a
technology company that provides self-service mini-markets to hospitals,
hotels, and company break rooms. Last August, he became one of roughly 50
employees at its headquarters in River Falls, Wisconsin, who volunteered to
have a chip injected into their hand.
The idea came about in early 2017, he says, when he was
on a business trip to Sweden—a country where some people are getting
subcutaneous microchips to do things like enter secure buildings or book train
tickets. It’s one of very few places where chip implants, which have been
around for quite a while, have taken off in some fashion.
The chips he and his employees got are about the size of
a very large grain of rice. They’re intended to make it a little easier to do
things like get into the office, log on to computers, and buy food and drinks
in the company cafeteria. Like many RFID chips, they are passive—they don’t
have batteries, and instead get their power from an RFID reader when it
requests data from the chip (McMullan’s chip includes identifying information
to grant him access to the building, as well as some basic medical information,
for instance).
A year into their experiment, McMullan and a few
employees say they are still using the chips regularly at work for all the
activities they started out with last summer. Since then, an additional 30
employees have gotten the chips, which means that roughly 80 of the company’s
now 250 employees, or nearly a third, are walking, talking cyborgs.
“You get used to it; it’s easy,” McMullan says. As far as
he knows, just two Three Square Market employees have had their chips
removed—and that was when they left the company.
Sam Bengtson, a software engineer, says he uses his chip
10 to 15 times a day. At this point, swiping his hand over an RFID reader
plugged into his computer is no different from typing in his password on a
keyboard, he says.
Steve Kassekert, vice president of finance, is so used to
using his hand to pay for soda at work that he was annoyed when the RFID reader
on the vending machine went down a couple of months ago.
“It’s just become such a part of my routine,” he says.
The company is also exploring some ways to use microchips
outside the body. McMullan says in August and September it is running tests at
two hospitals—one in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and another in Hudson, Wisconsin—that
will verify when doctors and nurses wash their hands. (They’ll wear bracelets
incorporating a chip that they can scan on an RFID reader to turn on a
sink—something that has been tried before.)
Nick Anderson, an associate professor in public health
sciences at the University of California, Davis, says the privacy and security
of any information stored on the chips is an obvious concern. The information
gathered by readers could give lots of details about employees’ comings and
goings, and someone could in theory ping your chip with a reader to find out
what’s on it.
“You can sniff it if you’re at a bus stop,” he says.
McMullan says only some of the information stored on the
chip in his hand is encrypted, but he argues that similar personal information
could be stolen from his wallet, too.
There’s also the chance—and it seems certain to happen
eventually—that the technology inside the employees’ bodies will become
outdated. Bengtson, at least, is concerned about this.
“There may need to be a—dare I say—upgrade program, or
something like that,” he says.
I guess vending machines are one of the amazing machines a company could have for better atmosphere.
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