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RFID Tattoo for Tracking Cattle and Humans
ack154 writes "The Register reports that a St Louis based company, Somark Innovations, has successfully tested RFID tattoos to be used for tracking cattle and other animals. Details are limited for the actual tattoo, but it's said to contain no metals and can be read up to about four feet away. Engadget has some more details on the matter. And yes, the article does mention RFID tattoos are possible for people, specifically the military. From the article: 'The system developed by Somark uses an array of needles to quickly inject a pattern of dots into each animal, with the pattern changing for each injection. This pattern can then be read from over a meter away using a proprietary reader operating at high frequency.'"
I'm not sure whether this can conform to the same specifications as what we normally consider RFID, but it's probably something they can read with radio waves, not an optical scan. Radio wave scanning can detect patterns and stuff too, you know.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If you RTFA, you will note that the RFID tag is only readable from "Up to four feet away". Somehow I don't think that really counts as a great distance.
When's the last time you saw a doorway over 4-feet wide? Unless you plan on staying in the wide-open spaces the rest of your life, you're going to be scanned and tracked. All it takes is a simple scanning device and a building entrance. They already have tags and scanners at doors for tracking stolen, they just add a new scanner that tracks RFID and viola`. We track and store that data, throw it into a database maybe link a couple of other databases together and now we know where you are, who you're with and what you're buying--all the time... But you don't care, it's not like you're a criminal or a terrorist or anything..
*cough*mythology*cough*