[Warning: Sensitive material ahead.] For over 20 years now, there has been a loose group of people in the United States who, if they have their way, will influence the government into using RFID (Radio Frequency IDentificaton) technology to track human beings. The little I know of this group comes from one of my college professors in the mid-1980s. According to him, this group’s agenda is to have all newborn babies in the USA given a subcutaneous tracking chip, similar to the ones now commonplace for household pets.

Their rationale is that such RFID chips would help prevent kidnappings as well as help busy parents monitor their children, in case they wander away. Unfortunately, there’s just so many things wrong with this whole approach. Besides turning civil liberties on its head - humans become cattle to be branded and herded - such chips will never stop a truly determined kidnapper. These chips would only be implanted on certain specific parts of the body. Kidnappers might decide to forcefully remove a chip under duress, thus causing physical harm that may not have happened otherwise. Consider also that after-the-fact evidence shows that an extremely high percentage of kidnappings in the United States and Canada are actually conducted by an estranged parent, or accomplices thereof. I’m not sure that RFID will help in this case.

As for the argument that these RFID chips will help monitor children, I have two questions. Firstly, how about actually paying attention to your children? No, that would be too hard, and would take out too much time from your busy schedule. Well, how about not having children if you’re too damn busy to ever watch them yourself? But, besides that, I still don’t understand why these chips have to be inserted into our bodies, instead of as part of, say, clothing or watches or jewelry. For every argument pro-sub-cutaneous, I can show you why it’s flawed and unnecessary. On the other hand, I am all for devices that can be worn on the body - as opposed to implanted - such as Kidspotter, worn like a watch.

Some people might argue that using these chips will create jobs. Sorry, but should these jobs be created at the loss of civil liberties? Like all new technologies, RFID will affect a lot of jobs but it will also create a lot of jobs over the next decade. None of these jobs can be justified if it means products that are implanted on our bodies, without our permission, for the purpose of tracking humans. This is not 1984, nor should we ever let this happen.

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