Good Monday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill’s Top Opinions.
The idea of replacing your home key or credit card with a microchip surgically implanted between your thumb and index finger may sound like the stuff of science fiction — but some 50,000 people across the world have already done it.
Such technology is fast becoming one we’ll all have to grapple with, writes West Point systems engineering professor ZHANNA L. MALEKOS SMITH. So, it’s best to evaluate the competing viewpoints now.
Smith writes: “Chip implants are just one of the many types of emerging technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) — an expanding digital cosmos of wirelessly connected internet-enabled devices.”
The evolving technology could cause health risks or be vulnerable to hackers or others who want to eavesdrop on device communications, issues which Smith explores. But it could also offer convenience to the masses and “increased mobility for people with physically limiting health conditions.”
Regardless, she writes, “[a]s the impact and influence of chip implants increases in the United States, it will raise complex questions for state legislatures and courts to consider, such as third-party liability for cybersecurity, data ownership rights and Americans’ rights under the Fourth Amendment…”
Technologists and lawmakers must be wary of the balance between innovation and abuse. But the onus cannot be on them alone. Ultimately, consumers “must understand their data rights as part of digital literacy.”
Read Smith’s entire op-ed here.
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