Thousands of Swedes Are Getting Microchips Implanted Under Their Skin: Why?
Technology is getting closer and closer to our bodies, from phones in our pockets to smartwatches on our wrists. Now, some people are taking it a step further—by letting technology under their skin. In Sweden, a country known for its technological progress, thousands of people are having microchips implanted in their hands. These chips are designed to speed up daily routines and make life more convenient, making it easier to access homes, offices, and gyms.
The chips can also be used to store important emergency contacts, social media profiles, and electronic tickets for events and trains within Sweden. Supporters of these tiny chips say they are safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist has raised concerns about privacy, especially regarding personal health data that could be stored on such devices.
Microchips Under the Skin: The Future or the Present?
These rice-grain-sized chips are usually implanted just above the thumb using a syringe similar to those used for vaccinations. The procedure costs about $180.
So many Swedes are lining up to get microchips that the country’s leading chip implant company says it can barely keep up with demand. More than 4,000 Swedes have already adopted this technology, and one company—Biohax International—has become the market leader. The chip implant firm was founded five years ago by Jowan Österlund, a former professional body piercer.
After working on this project non-stop for the past two years, Ă–sterlund is now developing training materials to hire Swedish doctors and nurses to help with the growing workload.
“Having different cards and tokens to prove your identity to all sorts of systems just doesn’t make sense,” he says. “Using microchips could mean a significant simplification of life in this interconnected environment.”
Early Adopters and Everyday Uses
Many early adopters of the chips come from Stockholm’s thriving startup scene. Erik Frisk, a 30-year-old web developer and designer, says he became interested in the technology as soon as he heard about it and decided to get his own chip in 2014.
“It’s completely passive, it has no power source, nothing like that. When you bring it close to a reader, the chip sends back an ID that tells the reader what kind of chip it is,” he explains.
“Swedes are very pragmatic, and the chip is useful. Plus, since many people know each other in the tech community—it’s very tight-knit—the trend spreads as people see the benefits,” says Frisk.
When Frisk moved into a shared house earlier this year, he organized a chip party for his new housemates. Now, they can access their 16th-century building in Stockholm’s Old Town by simply holding their hand up to a digital reader on the door.
“This chip basically solves my problems,” says 28-year-old Sylvia Varsegui, who also uses it to access her coworking space.
She also uses it to share her LinkedIn details at networking events, avoiding the need to spell her name correctly. She just taps another participant’s smartphone to transfer her information. “When the other phone reads the chip, they see a link and can open it in their phone’s browser,” Varsegui says.
Sweden’s largest railway company has started allowing passengers to use chips instead of tickets, and it’s said that chips will soon be used for payments in stores and restaurants.
“I don’t see any obstacles to the spread of chips. I think they can really improve people’s lives,” says Varsegui.
Why Is Sweden Leading the Way?
Ă–sterlund believes there are two main reasons why microchips have become popular in Sweden. First, the country has a long history of adopting new technologies well before many others and is quickly moving toward becoming a cashless society.
In the 1990s, the Swedish government invested in providing fast internet to its citizens and gave tax breaks to companies that provided home computers to their employees. Well-known companies like Skype and Spotify have Swedish roots.
“The more you hear about technology, the more you learn about technology, the less you fear it,” says Österlund.
Only 1 in 4 people in Sweden use cash at least once a week. According to the country’s central bank, Riksbank, the share of cash transactions has dropped from 40 percent in 2010 to 15 percent today.
Österlund’s second theory is that Swedes are less concerned about data privacy than people in other countries, thanks to high trust in Swedish companies, banks, large organizations, and government agencies.
Swedes are used to sharing personal information with many online retailers and administrative bodies that require social security numbers. Mobile phone numbers are widely available in online databases, and people can easily find out each other’s salaries by requesting tax data.
Österlund says personal microchips are much harder to hack than many other data sources because they are stored under the skin. “Everything can be hacked. But since it’s a microchip, it’s hard to hack. It’s inside you,” he says.
Privacy Concerns and the Future
There are a few outspoken critics of Sweden’s microchipping trend and almost no government regulation. But Ben Libberton, an English scientist living in southern Sweden, believes the situation needs to be closely monitored.
“What’s happening right now is relatively safe. But if chips become widespread, every time you want to do something and use a chip instead of a card, it will be very, very easy to get your personal information,” he says.
Libberton, a professional microbiologist working in science communication, says one of his main concerns is how chips could be used to share data about our physical health and bodily functions.
“Since it’s implanted in your body, the more health-related information is used and transmitted through the chip, the more concerns there are about protecting this extra layer of private data,” he says.
Despite these concerns, the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. This month, a coworking space in Stockholm is hosting a major implant party, where tech startup DSruptive promises to showcase a “new generation of consumer-level implants.” The device will include 2 KB of memory—twice as much as previous implants—a range of new features, and an LED light designed to improve privacy. The lights will blink if someone tries to read or access the implant.
Österlund says that stricter data privacy rules, which came into effect across the European Union earlier this year (GDPR), could also speed up the spread of microchips. “It’s the most serious set of laws protecting individual data integrity,” he says of GDPR. But this kind of regulation doesn’t exist globally, which could slow the trend elsewhere. “I don’t see the rest of the world adopting GDPR anytime soon. But all of Europe—one continent—is already a good start,” he says.