What is RFID - Part 2/4

RFID is an acronym for Radio Frequency Identification and it's being used in a lot more ways than you can imagine. Is that good thing or a bad thing? Part 2/4

So, besides from consumer products, where are these trips going? Well, they in straight into your body. That’s right. We’re talking about human implant RFID. Now, you might have heard of this before in terms of pet implants. You implant a small chip at the base of your animal spine. If you ever lose your animal and they find it, they can identify the animal, find you and get your anima home. So on October of 2004, the FDA approved a chip manufactured by the VeriChip Corporation for a human implantation. Now, this caught the eyes of certain people, most notably, Cathy Ulbrich and Liz McIntyre. Both huge privacy advocates as well as anti-RFID advocates. Now, they started doing some digging, and they found an FDA letter circulated within the FDA siting certain health risk associated with these chips that had just been approved for a human implantation. Most noticeably, there was—their tissues reaction to these chips, the possibility of the chip migrating within your body, the chip failing all together, general electrical hazards as well as MRI incompatibility. Nevertheless, the push for RFID has gone ahead. Now, the militaries are already talking about replacing dog tags with chips. Now, for my point of view, this might post a big of a problem, the most common place to implant the chip is a hat. Now, how often do they find only body parts? Most interestingly, however, in 2004, a Mexican district attorney office equipped 18 of its staff members with these implants. The rational behind this was they would be able to access a top secret data secure room as well as access certain database remotely, but most importantly this would help safeguard against kidnappings, in the case that a district attorney is kidnapped, and be able to save the person’s life a lot quicker. But there is a lot more popular marketing angles for this chip. Most notably, our identification, passports, patients in hospitals, as I have mentioned previously pets, but they are also car keys, car locks. They’re very common in books, bookstores and libraries for checking books out and preventing them from being stolen, clothing tags and tollbooths. On a more conventional big brother note, the US has already placed an order, a national identity card that’s going to be RFID equipped. And of course, privacy advocates as well as consumer protection agencies are concerned this is going to lead to a national database of who everyone is and exactly what they are buying. Now, of course this is impossible until each and every item is tagged with RFID.