Augmented body surveillance: Human microchip implantations and the omnipresent threat of function creep

Abstract

Implanted microchips can store users' medical, financial, and other personal information, and provide users with easy and quick access to various locations and items. While adopted for their convenience outside of the healthcare sector, these invasive, semi-permanent implantable devices create augmented bodies that can be subject to ubiquitous surveillance. Situating human microchip implantations within surveillance literature, we draw from neoliberal perspectives of surveillance to examine augmented bodies, particularly as sources for market activity and as subjects of social control and sorting when these bodies are used as access control mechanisms, payment methods, and tracking means in employment, residential, commercial, and transportation sectors. History has demonstrated time and time again how unfettered technology applications and uses have led to real and/or perceived misuse by private and public sectors. Through the lens of function creep, we identify a pattern of expansion of applications and uses of technology beyond those originally intended across new technologies, such as DNA genetic genealogy databases, IoT wearables, and COVID-19 contact tracing apps, and provide illustrative examples of function creep, particularly the use of these technologies in criminal investigations and prosecutions despite not being intended or marketed for such use. By demonstrating the lack of clearly defined boundaries in the applications and uses of various new technologies and their associated data, and the ways they were misused, we demonstrate how human microchip implantations are headed on a similar path. The current and potential future uses of this technology raise concerns about the absence of regulation, law, and policy barring or limiting its application and use in specific sectors, and the impact of this technology on users’ security, data protection, and privacy. Undeniably, the present and potential future functions, applications, uses, and extensions of human microchip implantations in various sectors warrant a proactive examination of their security, privacy, and data protection consequences and the implementation of proactive policies to regulate new and currently unregulated uses of this technology and its associated data within these sectors.