Biometric Bondage series: where we learn how anatomy is being linked to authentication in the AI era. I’m Adeline Atlas, 11-time published author, and today we’re going deep into one of the most disturbing developments in modern surveillance: the transformation of your physical body into an economic score. This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now. Welcome to the era of the body credit score—where your biology, your DNA, and your vital signs are being harvested, analyzed, and quietly turned into risk assessments that determine your financial future.

The credit score used to be about how you handled money—your payment history, debts, and income. Now, corporations and financial institutions are looking at a new form of risk profiling: biometric and health-based data. Your resting heart rate, your sleep patterns, your stress levels, even your inherited genetic traits—these are now being studied for how well they predict your reliability as a borrower, your likelihood of missing payments, or your chances of getting sick and becoming a financial liability. Health is no longer private. It’s predictive capital.

Wearables like the Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and Fitbit track a staggering range of biometric inputs. What began as consumer wellness tech has quickly evolved into a real-time surveillance grid. Insurance companies are already using biometric wearables to offer lower premiums to customers who meet algorithmically defined benchmarks for “health.” That might sound like a reward system, but in practice it means those who don’t share—or can’t match—the expected data patterns are punished with higher premiums or flat-out exclusion. What used to be a personal health routine is now a performance metric that feeds into financial systems.

The DNA angle is even more unsettling. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry offered the public a seductive service: learn about your ancestry, track your health risks, and explore your genome. But the true product wasn’t the results—it was the data. Behind the scenes, these companies were amassing enormous genetic databases, which have now been quietly monetized, sold to pharmaceutical corporations, and integrated into predictive analytics tools used by insurance and finance. Your genetic risk for disease can now, in some countries, legally impact your eligibility for life insurance, disability coverage, or long-term financial products. In the U.S., GINA—the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act—offers limited protection, but only in employment and health insurance. There’s no law stopping a bank from using genetic risk data to adjust your interest rate on a mortgage.

You might think this is extreme or far off, but the global infrastructure is already in place. During the pandemic, we saw the rapid rollout of digital health passports that tracked vaccine status and COVID exposure. These platforms are now quietly expanding their reach, merging with payment systems, digital ID services, and behavioral scoring tools. In China, WeChat integrates biometric data, health scores, and payment activity into a single unified profile. In India, the Aadhaar system ties fingerprint and iris scans to access to welfare, healthcare, and banking. In North America, programs like CLEAR and Apple HealthKit are already conditioning the population to hand over biometric data in exchange for convenience.

The unifying thread is this: once your body becomes the key to your identity, it’s also the key to your eligibility. No biometric data? No access. Poor biometric scores? No approval. You become a walking dataset that determines what you’re allowed to do, where you can go, and how much you’ll pay. Worse, you don’t control the score. Most biometric platforms do not guarantee user ownership of data. Instead, they retain the right to store, analyze, and share your data with partners. That partner could be a data broker. A pharmaceutical company. Or an AI firm looking to train a next-generation behavioral risk engine.

Even more concerning is the psychological conditioning involved. We are being taught that sharing biometric data is responsible. That letting a wearable track your pulse, breath, and movement is a civic good. That opting in gives you access to better services. But this is not empowerment—it’s coercion. If declining to share your data means you’re excluded from the system, then the system is not voluntary. It’s forced compliance dressed up as convenience.

And once biometric risk modeling becomes standard across industries, opting out will become economically devastating. Just like people today with no credit history struggle to rent homes or buy cars, tomorrow’s biometric nonparticipants may be labeled as “unscorable,” “risky,” or “non-compliant.” The danger isn’t just in the existence of these systems—it’s in their invisibility. Most users won’t know how their health data is being used. The scoring algorithms will be proprietary. The appeal process nonexistent. Your biometric data will be scraped, stored, modeled, and interpreted by machines you never meet and systems you never agreed to.

This raises serious ethical questions. Are you now financially penalized for having a chronic illness? Are you downgraded for being neurodivergent, for having a genetic predisposition to anxiety, or for needing medication? These systems don’t care about context—they care about patterns. The result is a chilling blend of biometric determinism and financial gatekeeping.

What’s unfolding is not just surveillance capitalism—it’s biometric capitalism. You are no longer judged by your actions or decisions alone. You’re judged by your body. And in this system, the body becomes both the access point and the risk factor. Every breath, every beat, every inherited marker is a data point that can be turned into profit—or denial.

This is the future we’re being eased into. A world where your pulse affects your loan rate. Where your genome determines your insurance premium. Where your sleep score influences your job interview. And the scariest part? Most people will accept it, because it will be presented as protection, personalization, or progress.

But make no mistake: once your biology becomes your bank account, the line between your body and your freedom disappears. You don’t need to be microchipped to be controlled. You just need to be measured—and monetized.

This is biometric bondage in its most insidious form: not through force, but through finance. Not by attacking your body—but by turning it into a barcode. And in the AI era, that barcode scans everything.