Magnifisyncopathological

Financial Times: US group implants electronic tags in workers

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been "tagged" electronically as a way of identifying them.

I say this as a person who believes private businesses are often under fire for trivial and senseless shit, someone who does not automatically assume the benefit of the doubt belongs with the employee rather than the employer:

I find this creepy.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

There are of course legitimate reasons to want to keep tabs on people who have regular contact with very valuable objects. Just as not every boss is a saint, not every worker is angelic. And just as I have the right to decide who enters my house, the owners of a company have the right to control who treads upon their property.

The technology's defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory.

Fundamentally, this argument is correct. The difference between asking someone to identify themselves if they wish to visit my house and asking someone to have a chip embedded in their skin to identify themselves if they wish to enter a room within my company's building is in degree, not in kind. And given the weight attached to government video surveillance it isn't surprising to know someone might think to add an extra layer of security.

However, just because some specific situation would not constitute a moral crime (as compulsory RFID embedding would) does not necessarily make it wise, prudent, or effective.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit.

There is a morale dimension to this that is important to note. Why would someone want to tag a pet? Most likely, it is because that person cannot directly control the pet or does not trust the animal to respond to coaxing or training 100% of the time. Control and trust are at the heart of this and it is prima facie evidence of the individual's conviction that there isn't enough of either in the relationship. No doubt Marxists see this as a blatantly unabashed and explicit example of "wage slave" economics and even if their theory is bunk it will resonate with decent people who are offended to know their boss wants to treat them like some lower mammal who annoyingly wanders off the reservation absent-mindedly.

I know I hate it when the state treats me like that.

"There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered," said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology.

But Sean Darks, chief executive of CityWatcher, said the glass-encased chips were like identity cards. They are planted in the upper right arm of the recipient, and "read" by a device similar to a cardreader.

"There's nothing pulsing or sending out a signal," said Mr Darks, who has had a chip in his own arm. "It's not a GPS chip. My wife can't tell where I am."

Despite what some might argue, this is not too similar with today's ID cards. I can lose an ID card. Should I desire to not identify myself, I can either passively refuse to present the card or actively not bring it with me.

My control is eroded significantly with an implant. Unless there is a way to shield the device from being scanned (such as lead plating), I cannot separate it from me, yet my arms and my lungs are mine and are affected by my will while there. I'm a relatively open guy who'll spill major events and information about my life to someone I met less than an hour ago, but I still retain the authority to my mind and my mouth.

I'm torn here because I've had many conversations and daydreams about, ironically enough, more precise computer control over my body in the form of implants and software. It's been a fantasy of mine for some time to be able to accurately self-diagnose my own physiological happenings. I mean, imagine how sweet it would be to know exactly what your blood alcohol level (or blood sugar level or any chemical level) at that moment in time...never mind being able to record previous measurements and save them for later consultation.

Neat stuff, but this kind of technology is not under discussion in the article. All these chips are alleged to do is sit there with a few hundred bytes of data, waiting to be scanned. While being identified or recognized without your explicit control can be extremely dangerous in some situations (domestic violence, spying), most of us don't go to great lengths to obscure our identity while in public. How many people wear long coats, wigs, makeup, and sunglasses to prevent someone from visually IDing them? The eye is a device for facial recognition, for reading the visual data our faces contain and despite the general downward plummet of contemporary behavioral standards, I can't remember a serious call to visually impair people to keep our identities private.

Hmm, probably should keep that idea to myself...

VeriChip – the US company that made the devices and claims to have the only chips that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration – said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes.

So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2006

It worries me because I just know assholes with delusions of legitimate authority will try to convince others to make this kind of thing a mandatory replacement for our existing official papers burden. I expect to see lots of three-letter acronym monster agents talking about how durn useful this would be and lots of drones with popular backing intoning about sacrifices for the greater good.

Given the context of today, I wonder if the actual individual good that would arise be worth the likely eventual bad.

I know that I'd have a problem with my boss asking that I have this done.