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.'"

Comments

Tattoos as ID?

[Vinegar Joe]

Didn't work out so well the last time somebody tried it.

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[solevita]

A couple of brief reasons:

1: Barcodes can't be read at distance, without me knowing about it. If somebody, for example, tried to read a barcode in my passport, I'd know. I wouldn't know if somebody had tried to read a RFID tag in my passport.

2: I'm sure that if the article related to barcoding cattle and soldiers, you'd have received similar comments. To be honest, I don't want RFID or barcodes printed on me for the world to see.

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[run_w_xcors]

GB? When's the last time you looked at all the cameras that are pointed at you in the US? A friend of mine and I were walking around San Francisco and I told him to count the amount of cameras he saw while walking around town. Just about everywhere we went (admittedly, in nice parts of town, not so much in say, the Tenderloin) we could see some form of camera that could possibly be pointed at us. To make matters worse, I got stopped on the street by a crew of people shooting a video for a handheld video camera (only making things worse because it was ironic we were just talking about being recorded in public). Now look at school initiatives to place cameras in all classrooms. Our children are being raised with digital eyeballs on them. When they get older, they won't know any better than having cameras pointed at them. Tin foil hat stuff...heh. Remember when Greenpeace was a bunch of stinky hippies on a boat? Now a former presidential candidate is running around talking about global climate problems. Conspiracies aside, there are tons of information gathering tools in use by the government. At this time the good news is that you're still protected by the constitution, unless of course, an executive order trumps that in times of "emergency".