Homeless to be Implanted with Subdermal RFID Tags

An anonymous reader writes "Politech has the scoop on the Bush administration's plans to forcibly implant RFID tags into homeless people in participating U.S. cities. Here's an excerpt from the UPI article: "The miniscule RFID tags are no larger than a matchstick and will be implanted subdermally, meaning under the skin. Data from RFID tracking stations mounted on telephone poles will be transmitted to police and social service workers, who will use custom Windows NT software to track movements of the homeless in real time... A second phase of the project, scheduled to be completed in early 2005, will wirelessly transmit live information on the locations of homeless people to handheld computers running the Windows CE operating system.""

Comments

Confound this evil plot!

[Bingo Foo]

You can defeat this plot by putting the homeless person in a microwave.

I agree, implanted ID tags are crazy

[sleeeper]

"Clever" as in "takes a real issue, and pushes it one step further into an uncomfortable area."

This was obviously written by someone who works with homeless programs. PATH is a real program, funded under the McKinney grant, and they are actually deploying Palms to collect data on mentally ill homeless persons.

On any other day, I would actually have believed this for half a second. Clearly, there are big privacy issues with collecting any sort of information on people. The current requirements make me any many others very uncomfortable. The federal government has actually received quite a bit of push back over this issue, and the final rule has been delayed for more than a year as a result of the privacy concerns.

Thankfully, it look like HUD will be making significant concessions to address community concerns, that will result in a final requirement that better protects client privacy.