Vein scanning has already been done before and the idea of using any biometric data for identification is not new either (certainly movies have also depicted using such devices). Not sure what is patentable about it, unless for example the scanning uses a fundamentally new method that makes it cheaper, etc.

Potential for abuse of such data is large, because if for example this company happened to be controlled by the CCP, I am thinking it would be banned quickly. In theory their solution might be privacy preserving, but there is no way to verify that in practice this is also the case. The secure enclaves on CPUs also turned out to be insecure.

As for people wondering why using social media is a risk:

• imagine a war between the US and China starting in 2035
• imagine that China can identify every family member of every soldier on the battlefield and has infiltrated the US with let's say ten thousand spies with special purpose 3D-printed drones that will kill every family member within an hour
• imagine that China has display devices that can show the enemy (in this case the US) a profile picture of the identified soldier with a live feed of their agents on US soil murdering their family. Now, what's that going to do for morale?

In a world without social media, how are they going to figure out on a mass scale who belongs to who and who lives where?

When a private joins the military by saying they took the bus to location X on a certain date or has GPS data for that date, the CCP can just increase the probability of it being a soldier and with enough data points, it would even be possible to measure the size of the US military (without depending on any US published numbers), its development over time, etc. From such numbers, you can derive the level of preparedness for war. The possibilities are endless and all that because the government was too stupid to ban CCP apps, because of "freedom".

That 16 year old Karin dancing in some video might be a drone squadron leader by age 29 in the China-America war of the 2030s. Her Mom that entered the video by accident with a car passing by with a certain number plate was enough to identify the general area. The accent of the voice of a random bystander was enough to pinpoint it even further and considering the CCP has had decades to prepare, all such deductions could be made automatically to be used by some propaganda system part of a real-time battle management system sending a message to Karin with the "offer" to surrender or have her entire family murdered. If you look at how skilled the human powered Bellingcat was and militarize such an intelligence capability, there is no limit to how far this can go.

The same holds for using a phone with American technology (which probably is all phones). Technology is a means of control and surveillance.