Photograph: Getty Images/WIRED

AT FIRST GLANCE, Lanour Beauty Salon seems like just another spot t o treat yourself to a blow dry or a manicure. The Dubai salon’s Instagram is filled with snaps of its customers showing off a new hairdo as they pose by a green wall filled with artificial foliage, or flaunting intricately designed nail art near shelves lined with beauty products. It seems like an unlikely site to prime UAE residents to experiment with a cyborg lifestyle. And yet, over the past year, Lanour Beauty has offered to embed a 128-byte microchip on their customers’ nails as part of a gel manicure. If you’re willing to cough up $68, the salon’s manicurists can program the chip to instruct any modern smartphone to pull up a digital file, open an Instagram profile, or head to a website.

Lanour’s manicure relies on Near Field Communications (NFC), which is the same technology that powers Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, explains Lanour Beauty’s Chief Executive, Nour Makarem, who currently has a chip on the nail of the ring finger of her right hand. Our smartphones can detect a specially-programmed NFC chip when it’s close by, enabling the two devices to exchange signals within a very short range.

Makarem beckons for me to scan her chip —which is virtually invisible underneath the glitter of her nail polish—as a demonstration. An NFC pop-up immediately appears on my iPhone, redirecting it to her salon’s homepage. “I don’t ever have to carry my business card,” she tells me proudly.

Now, it’s my turn. I sent the salon’s nail technicians a link to a catchy animation on the WIRED website so that I can easily show off our magazine to my future sources (much to my friends’ bemusement, my colleagues’ amusement, and my editor’s delight). Still, as I head to the bare, white tables lining the salon, and watch my nail technician open a sealed bag to reveal a grain-sized golden chip, I suddenly feel like a guinea pig.

After speaking with Makarem, I can envision a future where I’ll be able to program a chip on my nail to act as a keycard to my apartment, validate a train ticket, or transmit money from my bank account. Forget my business cards, I’d be able to leave my wallet and keys at home. I might even get away with forgetting to carry my smartphone, on occasion. These are capabilities that have fired the imaginations of technophiles and transhumanists for years.

At the same time, privacy activists have expressed alarm over some of the darker possibilities raised by the technology. Some have even described the technology as an Orwellian omen, and warn that our chips could eventually be turned against us.

As the Lanour nail technician conceals the microchip on my nail with gold glitter, I start to wonder how the Middle East will react to the technology. Will its inhabitants embrace the microchip implant as the future of microelectronics—or will they avoid it at all costs?

THE PRACTICE (OR ART) of human microchipping dates back almost a quarter of a century. Back in 1997, the performance artist Eduardo Kac inserted a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip into his left ankle in front of his audience in Sao Paulo, Brazil. At the time, NFC and RFID chip implants were largely used to identify livestock or recover stray pets. As part of his performance, known as Time Capsule, Kac became the first human to register himself in a remote database. Kac describes the piece as part of a commentary on the ethical implications of the technology. “Just the idea that someone can retrieve information from inside you without you knowing is frightening,” the artist told WIRED in 2002.

Performance artist Eduardo Kac inserted a radio-frequency identification chip into his left ankle in Sao. Photograph: KAC STUDIO LLCU
Paulo, Brazil.

Over the years, human microchipping has become less provocative in countries like Sweden, where body-modifiers, or biohackers, have experimented with the technology to pay for gym memberships or to ride the train. During the pandemic, Swedish media outlets reported that biohackers were even linking their Covid-19 vaccine passports to their chips.

Human microchipping has become less provocative in countries like Sweden. Photograph: KAC STUDIO LLCU

Still, not everyone is a fan. After the US-based Three Square Market held a widely-publicized event to implant microchips under the skin of their employees in 2017, the vending machine company was forced to deal with a barrage of criticism. Some spectators took to Three Square’s Facebook page and urged their employees to quit, while others filled its Google reviews page with one-star ratings. Online commentators even compared the implant to the ‘Mark of the Beast,’ or the Devil’s mark described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation.

When it comes to cultural acceptance, Swedish biohacker Jowan Österlund is of the opinion that UAE residents are more likely to side with the Swedes. “I’d say [microchipping] definitely has a lot of potential in the Middle East,” he says, after I reach out to him on LinkedIn. “I think the starting point, however, would be as [a] slightly more exclusive service,” where businesses allow customers to validate special memberships, make crypto payments, or show their digital IDs using their body chip implants.

Österlund speaks from firsthand experience. During Dubai’s annual GITEX tech event in 2019, he showed off the microchip technology developed by his startup, BioHax, at UAE telecom Etisalat’s stand. As interested passersby volunteered to get a microchip implanted into their hand, Österlund says his team aimed to show them a possible future for retail. “We scanned and built an app for the phone, so we could just program your chip,” he explains, allowing shoppers to scan the items that they wanted and pay for them. “The reception of it was incredible,” he adds. “So many people wanted it.”

Photograph: Getty Images

Österlund’s own journey with microchipping, which began years ago, was spurred out of a similar curiosity (and love of a little risk). “I’ve been doing body modification for a large part of my life and I knew how to put stuff in your body without hurting it,” he says. After the biohacker came across NFC chips, which were encased in a biocompatible glass casing, he began to wonder whether the chip frequencies would be damaged when placed in a saline environment like the human body—or whether they could still be sensed by an NFC chipreader. He decided to give it a try, and implanted an NFC chip under his skin. “The first thing I did, I put a call trigger,” Österlund tells me. “So whenever I put my phone in my hand, I would call my wife. It’s a typical crowd pleaser.”

While BioHax was forced to wind down its chip-implanting services during the pandemic, Österlund is still bullish on the technology shifting from party tricks to mainstream use. “Every piece of stuff you have in your wallet is a liability,” he says, observing that microchip implants could therefore prevent you from losing your driver’s license or other forms of identity.

Still, customers would need the data stored on their microchip to stay secure, acknowledges Österlund. That’s why he thinks microchipping companies should first target the Middle East’s wealthier residents—and perhaps increase the odds that governments will establish proper frameworks around the technology’s usage. “If you start doing it on that type of [high] level, when it trickles down, you already have all the safeguards and all the redundancy,” he says. “If you f**k around with people’s data, you’re going to get punished.”

Photograph: Sam Allison

WE’RE ALREADY LIVING in a data economy. Just think of Facebook, which tracks the places you check into, the groups you join, the posts that you find funny or upsetting, and the people you interact with. The data is primarily used to tailor which advertisements you see, which ultimately makes more money for Facebook.

Similarly, Google makes money by tracking how you use its devices, apps, and services. The places you visit, the purchases you make, the YouTube videos you watch, and the instructions you give your Google Assistant, each fuels the company’s ability to personalize ads to your taste.

Big Tech companies aren’t the only ones surveilling you. Spotify remembers your music tastes, Netflix pays attention to the movies and shows that you binge, and a stylish new generation of wearables are tracking everything from your heart rate to your sleeping patterns.

Österlund doesn’t have a problem with all that information being collected—as long as he knows how the data is used. “All convenience comes at a price. I don’t mind. But what I want to know is, what’s the cost?”

However, Cathryn Grothe, an analyst covering the Middle East and North Africa at the human and digital rights watchdog, Freedom House, suggests that Österlund may be an outlier. “Covid-19 has made people concerned about the data that’s shared [about] them online, and how that can cause online and offline harms,” she says. “These microchip implants are another example of the swath of tech products that claim to offer convenience without fully taking into account the potential harms to privacy and other human rights.”

Photograph: Sam Allison

She points to Apple’s Airtags as an example. Last May, after Apple announced that it was selling a tiny, Bluetooth-enabled homing beacon to help you track lost luggage or keys, privacy activists Albert Fox Cahn and Eva Galperin expressed concern over its potential for misuse by stalkers and abusers. “Apple needs to take domestic abuse and stalking seriously,” the pair wrote in a WIRED opinion piece. “It’s very easy with a technology like this, to stick it under the seat of a car, drop it into someone’s bag, and then suddenly, it’s much easier to track someone’s geolocation data,” Grothe adds. “I think the potential for misuse and abuse there is pretty clear.”

Although the NFC chips used by Lanour Beauty aren’t capable of tracking your location, Grothe says we can’t rule out that possibility emerging in other startups as microchipping technology evolves. “If chips could be full of people’s personal, sensitive data, and whether these evolved to be tracked from an external location,” she says, then it could be a cause for worry.

Legal safeguards and data-protection are another consideration, according to Grothe. Companies may not always have an incentive to secure customer data, but government regulations might keep them in line. Currently, tracking technology and products like Apple Airtags are starting to “outpace meaningful regulation,” she says, creating opportunities for misuse. Many countries in the Middle East currently lack data-protection laws. Out of the countries that do have such a framework, Grothe says, “many of those laws really need serious reforms to ensure that people’s rights are protected.”

As a result, Grothe says that existing data-protection laws do not guarantee that the technology will be used responsibly in the region. The Freedom House analyst is especially apprehensive about the prospects of social media companies or website owners being forced to hand over user data to government agencies without due process. “When we see these technologies being rolled out in countries that have a history of abusing personal data, or biometric information, or using spyware technologies to target or surveil, not just outspoken journalists or activists, but also marginalized groups, government critics and ordinary online social media users, this is where I think the concern really lies,” she says. “It’s not just the data itself,” she adds. As startups position the technology to be adopted in the region, Grothe says it is crucial to think about the multiple avenues through which data might be misused.

Photograph: Sam Allison

Grothe has yet to hear of any country actually forcing its residents to rely on microchip implants. Still, she does see it becoming a possibility in some countries. “I think the trends we’ve seen in terms of digital IDs, could start to [show] how that’s becoming a little more commonplace,” she says. “In some cases, it seems like that could be mandated. I think that’s where the concern rises, is if these things start to get to that level, where it no longer could be [a way to] opt in.”

AS I TEST MY MICROCHIP over the next two weeks, I can easily believe that many of Grothe’s concerns will dog the adoption of this biohacking technology. Over the past two weeks, my chip has attracted plenty of fanfare from my colleagues at WIRED Middle East’s parent company, Nervora. “I expect you can probably hear colors now,” joked one of our creative producers. It’s also granted me additional legitimacy as a technology reporter among my friends.

However, I’ve noticed that few seem ready to head to Lanour Beauty Salon and get their own temporary microchip. Many clients do worry about privacy, acknowledges Lanour’s Makarem. She says that she has previously reassured customers that the data they store on their microchip is wiped clean after they return to get their gel manicure removed.

However, as Lanour Beauty builds out more use cases for the technology, Makarem predicts that the microchip manicure is likely to become mainstream. She says the salon is currently working on adding a layer of security to the NFC chips, to enable future customers to pay without their wallets or phones. “Especially, I think in the future, we’ll look to pay [by chip],” she says. “You forget your smartphone sometimes… but you can’t forget your finger.”

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