No, young shoppers do not want to pay with chip in skin

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of statistics in reporting. Here’s an example that happens to intersect with issues of privacy.

The Daily Mail is featuring a story titled “Young shoppers want to pay with chip in skin”, extolling the fact that teenagers are willing to have microchip implants as a means of paying in stores. But three paragraphs into the story you discover that only around 8 percent of 13 to 19-year-olds are open to the idea of microchip implants.

Wow, 8%. That means 92% don’t want to pay with implanted microchips. Of course, a headline like “Eleven-twelfths of teens don’t want anything to do with becoming digitally-enhanced consumer cyborgs” doesn’t sell papers.

A broader concern here is that when these kind of memes start circulating – that kids think its no big deal to have chips implanted linked to their personal & financial information – general expectations of privacy and informational norms start to change.

[found via Canadian Privacy Law Blog]