Will getting chipped enable malicious biohackers?

The CEO has three such chips in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information.

Three Square Market, a US company in Wisconsin, asked its 200 employees if they would be interested in getting chipped in the same way. More than 90 said yes, and they now use the implants to enter the building, unlock computers, and buy snacks from the company’s vending machines.

Digiwell is one of the companies offering such services, and biohackers estimate that there are at least 100 000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’” CEO Patrick Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

Kramer is also a co-founder of a company called VivoKey Technologies, which is developing a more advanced implant able to generate passwords for online transactions.

But biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. Implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others.

“You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.

Research institute Gartner has meanwhile identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends with the potential to disrupt traditional businesses.

The human augmentation market will also grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as such industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing, researcher OG Analysis says. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland told Bloomberg.

Reasercher Rich Lee, from Utah, has magnetic implants in his fingertips to pick up metal objects, two microchips in his hands that can send messages to phones, and a biothermal sensor in his forearm to measure temperature. “We’re the first movers,” Lee says. “But as the technology becomes more mainstream, there will be potential uses for pretty much everybody.”

At BdyHax, a conference in Austin, Texas, people follow trends and come to view the latest gadgets. At this year’s event, speakers included the developer of an artificial pancreas, a representative of a group advocating tech connections to the brain, as well as a researcher from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who is looking into various new applications.

Tesla founder Elon Musk, even claims that people must become cyborgs to stay relevant, and has raised at least $27 million for Neuralink Corp, a startup developing brain-computer interfaces.

Neuralink is planning an announcement that’s “better than probably anyone thinks is possible,” says Musk in a video where he himself is seen smoking marijuana.

The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) of the American Medical Association published a report in 2007 warning that RFID implanted chips may compromise privacy because there is no assurance that the information contained in the chip can be properly protected.