The thing that bother me is privacy. It's not like I can invent my own gsm networkthingiemahbob and be the only one to have access to the data. ya dig? I know that I can stay away from the data of where-she-might-be until an emergency arises, having been root on many servers but never ever read users mail. Yaknow? Yeah, I'm mad.

That isn't the worst idea I've ever heard, but if I were sitting around with a friend and they said "oh, yeah, I chipped my kid" I would take my beer, get up, run away, and never talk to them again because that is really fucked up behaviour.

aye, it ain't exactly a pierced ear.

I blame this whole post on hormones. So there.

I was thinking the other day about getting RFID tags for my kitty cats since they're so averse to wearing collars and if they got lost, the animal control people could scan the cats and then I could get them back. My cats can't talk and tell the people at the pound where their human lives. However, the likelihood of them getting out of the house and then getting lost is pretty remote, so I 'll probably not put them through the pain.

Now for kids and humans in general it is a terrible idea. The opportunities for misuse far outweigh the any benefit. It is bad enough our passports will have these so we can be monitored in airports. If not for nefarious government activities, that scene in Minority Report where all of the ads talk to him would make me rip that out.

RFID can be used for good -- like toll-tags, on my visa card, and to get into my office -- but none of those things are permanently imbedded in me.

Parents are too freaked out these days. We've managed millions of years without putting a chip into kids to track them and seem to be OK for it.

[oh and a GSM chip in a kid or anything wouldn't do much since they can work in only phones.]

[oh, and someday the RFID chips will be so small the government will implant them into human babies when they are inoculated against diseases]

*iiih!* Ok now you really freaked me out birdherder.

I never got my cats cat passports because they need chips implanted in their necks. Since they can't say "oi, this thing in my neck is hurting me" I didn't want to. Had it been a simple barcode tattooed inside the ear I would've. I now tats only hurt right as they make'em.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. By the time they're five, most kids would've figured a way to have the chip bloodlessly removed and sitting on the kitchen table.

The whole Minority Report scenario can be avoided by multiple factor authentication. The implanted chip just stores a unique key. You also possess an external "permissions" token which would have to be present to enable decryption of the implanted key, against permissions for use of the implanted key on remote authenticating servers. You could, of course, possess several external "permissions keys" each containing different permissions, and you would select which tokens to carry for the activities you'd expect to need authentication for, while you were in public, like you may take some appropriate pocket change with you now, when heading out from home. Finally, remote authenticating servers in secure locations are the repository for personally identifiable information.

In a pinch (such as when a kid is "pinched" or kidnapped), a parent could release external "permissions" keys for lost children, to enable any sensor station to identify, and only identify the individual for whom a search is being conducted. If a target individual were still in relatively public circumstances in a pervasive enough sensor network, their location would "automagically" pop out in seconds. That's the whole point of trying to use the GSM cell phone network, since it is the only network with broad enough geographical coverage to make the "find lost child" mission even remotely practical. Unfortunately, it is not a multi-factor authentication network design, so abuses based on single factor authentication issues are endemic.

We've only in the last generation been able to create unambiguous identification tokens from hard to modify biometric data. If we lock these tokens to most, or all, individuals at birth (by implanted chip or otherwise), and then make that data readily available via long term single factor encryption, it is easy to see immediate potential for abuse, by both governments and criminals, much as the cell phone network currently suffers continuing financial losses due to cloners and phreakers. But if the value of unambiguous identification eventually becomes greater than anonymity to society at large, it is not that hard to upgrade the GSM network for multi-factor "permissions" style authentication.

Eventually, I think it is more of an ethics question, and the answer, for each respondent, is probably, at this time, influenced by crime statistics in their locale and their own susceptibility in same. If you're living in Switzerland, you probably see little point in such things, but if you're an expat American family living in Rio de Janeiro, driving your family around with bodyguards in an armored car, you might feel differently.

"oh, yeah, I chipped my kid"

Did they salsa him, too?