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When Frisk moved into a shared house earlier this year, he organized a chipping party for his new housemates. Now they can access the 16th century building they share in Stockholm's Old Town by tapping their hands on a digital reader by the door. And she uses it to share her LinkedIn details at networking events, avoiding the need to spell out her name.
We sell NFC and RFID related products to Australia & NZ. For us, microchips will make life more convenient. identification) chip opens doors with a wave of your hand in front of a chip reader. And at.
She simply touches another attendee's smartphone and the information is transferred. Sweden's largest train company has started allowing commuters to use chips instead of tickets , and there's talk that the chips could soon be used to make payments in shops and restaurants. I think it's something that can seriously make people's lives better," Varszegi says. Osterlund believes there are two key reasons microchips have taken off in Sweden.
First, the country has a long history of embracing new technologies before many others and is quickly moving toward becoming a cashless society. In the s, the Swedish government invested in providing fast Internet services for its citizens and gave tax breaks to companies that provided their workers with home computers.
And well-known tech names such as Skype and Spotify have Swedish roots. Only 1 in 4 people living in Sweden uses cash at least once a week.
And, according to the country's central bank, the Riksbank, the proportion of retail cash transactions has dropped from around 40 percent in to about 15 percent today. Osterlund's second theory is that Swedes are less concerned about data privacy than people in other countries, thanks to a high level of trust for Swedish companies, banks, large organizations and government institutions. Swedes are used to sharing personal information, with many online purchases and administrative bodies requiring their social security numbers.
Mobile phone numbers are widely available in online search databases, and people can easily look up each other's salaries by calling the tax authority. Osterlund implants a chip into a man in Stockholm. More than 4, Swedes have adopted the technology. Osterlund says personal microchips are actually more difficult to hack than many other data sources because they are stored beneath the skin.
But the reason to hack them will never be bigger because it's a microchip. It's harder for someone to get to, since you put it in you," he says. There are few vocal critics of Sweden's microchip trend, and there is currently no national legislation regulating the growing industry. However, Ben Libberton, a British scientist based in southern Sweden, is among those starting to campaign for lawmakers to keep a closer eye on developments. But if it's used everywhere, if every time you want to do something and instead of using a card you use your chip, it could be very, very easy to let go of [personal] information," he says.
Libberton, a trained microbiologist now working in science communication, says one of his main concerns is how the chips could be used to share data about our physical health and bodily functions. Despite these concerns, there seems to be no letup in the trend. One coworking space and innovation hub in Stockholm is holding a large implant party this month where a tech startup, DSruptive, is promising to reveal "the next generation consumer-level implant.
Bengtson, at least, is concerned about this.
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