Slashdot Mirror
CA Bill Limits Skin Implantation of RFID Chips
twitter writes with a link to a ZDNet blog entry about a piece of legislation submitted to the California state senate. Drafted by Democratic Senator Joe Simitian, its purpose is to ensure that employers cannot require the implantation of RFID chips as part of employment. It is meeting with scorn from the American Electronics Association. "'Our bottom line is we're opposed to anything that demonizes RFIDs,' she said. 'The technology has been in existence for more than 50 years. It's in more than 1.2 billion ID credentials worldwide. ... We've not seen a single showing of ID theft or harm,' said Roxanne Gould, vice president for California government relations for the American Electronics Association, a high-tech industry group."
How can I be guilty of not reading the fine article, when there is no fine article to be read?
This sig is intentionally blank
The correct way to mark employees is still an ear tag.
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php? type=wnews&id=76472&eddate=
this might help.
Employers are requiring a medical procedure as a condition of employment. How about tattooing the employee ID, or neutering the staff to make them more docile, although that would be redundant for any employee that accepted the chip in the first place.
This is not primarily about the RFID security. It is about mutilating the staff to save the employer the cost of installing and using a less Nazi-slave-like security system. Seems to me that any doctors that perform the procedure should have their license removed. The tags are hardly justifiable as cosmetic surgery providing any self-image benefit, since the tags aren't supposed to be visible.
I refuse to accept the mark of the beast.
The problem with implanted RFID is that most people underestimate their future costs as a result of an employer implanting the chip. It costs considerably more to remove an RFID, in money and personal risk, and the employer makes no provision to pay for this. Over a lifetime of jobs, once all employers require RFIDs, how many of these chips will need to be implanted? Assume that every time you change employers or even locations for the same employer you'll need new chip implanted. Every time a system is cracked (your individual chip or the outdated technology of the original chip) you'll need another chip implanted. If your company is bought by another company, implant a new chip. Technology changes constantly and employment terms for one entity are becoming increasingly shorter than in the past. Once employers do it, everyone else will want a chip under your skin for credit cards, or even customer memberships. You may have, literally, hundreds of opportunities to be re-chipped. How many chips can you realistically implant in your arm? Will you be forced to remove some of them because they compete with other technology? (The RFID used for toll booths in Maryland and Delaware are incompatible so I have to put one in the glove box to pass through the other because their systems interfere and cannot read their own ID if the other ID is also present.)
How many of these concerns do you think a person who is asked to install a chip has actually considered before they get implanted? The long term issues of chipping and the future costs which will be borne by the person being chipped and they are woefully uninformed. This lack of information availability is exactly what allows larger players in a market to abuse the smaller players. When a company knows the dangers but the employees or customers do not, they can shift future costs to them because they lack this information. The market is notoriously bad at affixing future costs to those who caused the problem (from cancer risks of smoking to pollution of locales to bad economic decisions.)