Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Company Requires RFID Implants

Wow, just wow. How can this be a reasonable requirement for employment? For me, drug testing was already over the line...this...

Oh, and is the company responsible for any potential medical complications from the implantation? What if the glass the chip is encapsulated in shattered and did damage to the muscles?

It's also funny that CityWatcher claims that the chip "isn't required to maintain employment", yet is required to enter the datacenter. What if your job involves constant interaction with the physical datacenter? If no one who works in the data center wants the chip, then what? I find it hard to believe they'd keep a batch of employees who are unwilling to work given the new criteria. Hopefully they'd get fired and take the company to court, where someone at the federal level deems this to be against the law.

Company requires RFID injection
Published: 2006-02-10

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.

Ironically, the extra security sought may be offset by a recent discovery of Jonathan Westhues, where the security researcher showed the VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant’s authentication. When contacted, those at CityWatcher were unaware of the chip's security issue, according to the spychips.com release.

Posted by crimnos @ 9:40 AM