Byte by Bite

Company's computer chips a little fishy

by Marv Dealy

Tiny silicon chips have been used for years to track pets, vehicles, stuff in large warehouses, boxes in trucks, and even unidentified human remains after hurricane Katrina.

Now, several workers at a Cincinnati surveillance company (CityWatcher.com) have had chips implanted in their forearms. A radio frequency identification chip (RFID) also found a home in the forearm of the company’s chief executive Sean Darks who said: “I’m not going to ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do myself. None of my employees are forced to get the chip to keep their job.” (http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060214/D8FOKJPG7.html?PG=home&SEC=news)

The RFIDs, about the size of a grain of rice, are implanted by a doctor just under the skin and work like an access card, said Dark. “There’s a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door.”

Darks says that the implants don’t enable CityWatcher to track employees’ movements, saying “It’s a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever. It’s the same thing as a keycard.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that the idea of having a implanted silicon chip which its makers claim can’t track you is a little more than a keycard. How difficult can it be to make the RFID emit a signal, thereby enabling whatever Internet cloud you happen to be near to track you?

When you’re in a large metropolitan area that has an Internet cloud and you use a WiFi-equipped computer, companies such as Google are working hard on technology to “see” where you are and feed you commercials from merchants right around your immediate area. That sounds like tracking to me. Just how hard could it be for CityWatcher to develop a RFID that does emit a signal. Who’s to say agencies we’ve never heard of haven’t been using them for years the technology is decades old, after all.

The RFID might have been a good thing for Martha Stewart, come to think of it. No clumsy ankle bracelet to mar the lines of her slacks just a little chip under the skin and away she goes.

Personally, I think I’ll retreat into the back of the cave and bar the entrance with stacks of old computer monitors which, as they contain all sorts of toxins, ought to hold off the enemy for a bit.