Why Did I Implant A Chip In My Hand?

A few months ago, in the expo-hall of the Austin Convention Center, I laid my left hand flat on a sheet of sterile paper and let a very tall, friendly man insert an RFID chip into the space between my thumb and index finger. “Oh, you’ve got thick skin,” he said, pressing the needle a little harder. I made a half-hearted joke about being a woman on the internet, and the whole thing was over.

Today, the tiny scab has healed, and the device sits just below the surface of my skin, where it looks like a little pill poking up out of my hand. Often, when I tell people I have an RFID chip, they react with confusion and a tiny drop of horror. “You have a what? Why?” Then they want to touch the little bead through my skin — if I squeeze my thumb and pinky together you can see the bulge and feel its hard exterior.



What they’re touching is a passive, near-field communication (NFC) chip encased in glass. It’s likely that you’ve used a chip like this recently, if you’ve had to tap a fob to a keycard reader at your office, or if you’ve held your phone near a card reader to pay for something. If you have a pet with a microchip, you’re living with an animal that has the same technology that’s in my hand.

RFID Implant
RFID IMPLANT

An implantable RFID chip from the Dangerous Things online store, next to a quarter for scale

Dangerous Things

The place that most people buy RFID chips like this, designed for human implantation, is Dangerous Things, an online store that sells four different implantable transponders. Its founder, Amal Graafstra, is the tall man who implanted mine. Dangerous Things has sold several thousand of these implants to bodyhackers all over the world, who use them for everything from opening the doors to their homes and offices, to unlocking their cars, to fun projects like auto-displaying GIFs on a phone or marking a geocache. The chip can also store information and (if a chip reader is placed really close to it) transmit that data.

The most common question I get about the implant (aside from “why would you do that?”) is whether I’m being tracked. The short answer is no. RFID chips aren’t that powerful. Think again of your office keycard: If you’ve ever had trouble getting it to work through a bag or wallet, you know that these chips aren’t good at transmitting through anything, let alone over long distances. My chip certainly can’t talk to a satellite. Just like your dog’s microchip can’t locate her when she runs away, my RFID chip couldn’t tell anybody where I am—even if I wanted it to. And that’s not the only limitation my implant has.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/my-boring-cyborg-implant