As headlines proclaim that microchips injected under the skin could allow employers to track our every move, the reality is very different.
When Swedish firm Epicenter offered to inject its staff with insertable technology for free, allowing them to access things like security doors and photocopiers, the media response was to immediately speculate that employers everywhere could soon be using microchips to track employees’ “every move”.
But concerns that the technology could or would be used to collect data, on your “health … whereabouts, how often you’re working, how long you’re working, if you’re taking toilet breaks”, as one report put it, is just plain false.
It relies on misconceptions about how microchips work, often taken from science fiction, rather than the current technology being used. Our research at the University of Melbourne looks at a class of devices called “insertables” that individuals voluntarily place within their bodies, predominately for non-medical, convenience-oriented, purposes.
MYTH 1: MICROCHIPS CAN TRACK YOUR LOCATION
The technology behind the implants that the Epicenter staff are being offered is no different from the dongles or ID tags many employees already wear around their necks or on their belts.
It is also similar to the technology inside your public transport payment card, like Myki cards in Melbourne, or Oyster cards in London – but it’s also used in Pay Wave credit card technology.
These are passive devices and have no battery inside them. They have no GPS capabilities. You cannot be geo-located from your Myki card, nor can a lost pet be found remotely by pinging the microchip – you cannot be tracked from these cards.
Your average smartphone with a large battery cannot last 24 hours running GPS. The technological advances needed to make an implantable GPS tracking device, along with a battery, is likely to be decades away.
MYTH 2: MICROCHIPS CAN PINPOINT YOUR LOCATION INSIDE THE OFFICE
The current range of these microchips is very short. This is because the antennas are very small, requiring the chip to be brought directly to the reader, in many cases physically touching it.
The access tags and cards we habitually wear, as well as credit cards, are much more powerful as they are larger in size, and so have a much bigger antenna, which can be picked up further away from card readers. But even with these larger antennas the read ranges are quite short – for example you have to touch your credit card very close to the readers at the checkout in supermarkets.
For an employer to track your location inside your office they would need large readers that could cover every square inch of the office. Or they could perhaps require you to walk with your hand touching the wall, so that the microchip could be picked up. They would be able to track your existing work access card or dongle much more easily than this, but even that is still unlikely given current read ranges.
If your office required you to scan in and out of every room in the office, and your ID was tied back to you personally, and someone analysed that data, they could determine which rooms you accessed – whether it’s wearable cards or insertable technology.
However, it’s unlikely that your employer would want to pay for this overhead. And this is not the case at Epicenter. I’ve spoken to Hannes Sjob who runs the program at the company in Stockholm who confirmed they do not require staff to swipe to access the bathroom facilities.
MYTH 3: MICROCHIPS CAN TRACK WHAT YOU ARE DOING, AND IF YOU ARE WORKING
These microchips are passive, they do not have the ability to record any data.