Good reading about chipping....privacy is a huge issue as the article points out...and a lifetime of 15 years for the chip? That is a long time, and loss of identity...read the comments and decide for yourself. There are benefits, but is it worth giving up some of your privacy...I'm not ready for that myself and probably won't be at any near time in the future as long as there is no additional security in place to guarantee that my chip couldn't be hacked and scanned at will...I could disappear and my identity could live on...BD
CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.
"To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."
"It feels just like getting a vaccine — a bit of pressure, no specific pain," says John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
He got chipped two years ago, "so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly." (A chipped person's medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a database accessed via the Internet.)
Halamka thinks of his microchip as another technology with practical value, like his BlackBerry. But it's also clear, he says, that there are consequences to having an implanted identifier.
"My friends have commented to me that I'm 'marked' for life, that I've lost my anonymity. And to be honest, I think they're right."
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