Kit's Blog

An interesting but bad idea

My puppy went in for surgery last week to get spayed. When I dropped her off, they asked me if I wanted to get her microchipped as well. I told them she'd been microchipped already when she was a baby. If she ever gets lost, all animal services has to do is pass a scanner over her, and immediately they'll know where she lives, and how to contact me. It got me thinking a little bit... how come we don't microchip humans?

Unless everyone agrees with me, which would make for a pretty boring discussion. But that never happens anyway.

--Tim of CAD Comics

     It's one of those arguments that I'm not really sure I can win. What do I mean by that? Arguing against it. It's a slow inevitable tide leading towards a single, nationwide ID system. But this here takes it even further. Why not shove a chip in that can just be scanned conveniently to identify you and everything about you? Allow me to insert a shudder here.
     We'll take a minute to look at the pluses. In a lot of ways, yes, it would be more convenient to be able to be scanned and recognized in terms of identification. You'd be able to buy things like beer, porn, guns, and whatnot without a blink of wonder as to whether or not the ID was fake. Criminal, medical, and educational histories would be immediately available, and greatly increase the speed of background checks for things like jobs, prescription medication, and weaponry. But now let's step back. What are the implications of this?
     So all this information couldn't reasonably be stored on a chip inside your body. Today's technology couldn't hold that much information without being oversized thus presenting an issue of surgical insertion and acceptance by the body. Clearly, there would have to be maintained databases with all this sort of information on it. Your chip would, at best, contain an enormously long identification number of some sort that would be used to access that information on nationwide databases (The chips inside of dogs are so convenient because the only place where they would be scanned is in a pound of some sort, where the information would be immediately accessible because all pounds work on one national database; they only have an identification number on the chip). Now, medical databases are being found continually more useful as coordination increases and everyone submits their information. But as recent scandals have proven, those are hardly secure. Tens of thousands of records were stolen only months ago from a company maintaining databases of veteran soldiers medical information. The scandal was huge in that the information lost included names, addresses, and social security numbers. All of the people involved were now at risk for identity theft, and remain so to this day.
     So lets extrapolate a bit here, shall we? Pretending that we did the most simplistic thing possible, everyone would now contain their social security number in a chip somewhere under their skin. Now we all know that the social security number is incredibly important thing, due to the unprecedented amount of access it gives to someone's life. Now we're wearing it at all times. So, you're sitting in a bar. Sure, now when you want to buy that beer you just swipe your wrist under a scanner and boom, it's yours. Identification with that credit card? Bam! Wrist again. Damn that was convenient. You're feeling like crap though because your girlfriend just dumped you. You start chatting up the guy next to you, and you're having a pretty good conversation when you finally introduce yourself. He introduces himself as John, and offers you a handshake. After having a good evening talking about life you part ways. On the way home you realize your wallet is gone. Oh well, no need to worry, no one else has your wrist, so what can they do? The next few weeks are uneventful, until a policeman shows up with a warrant for your arrest. You're not sure what's going on, but you cooperate. The policeman scans your wrist, and sure enough, it's you. What happened? Identity theft. Faster and easier than ever before. That one handshake? The man had a scanner under his sleeve, and now had all the information he could have ever wanted from you. After checking a few databases, all her had to do was use your information for anything he wanted. And I imagine that if a thief were talented, or had the right connections, you could masquerade as someone else by removing your chip. Anyone else remember "Minority Report"? The eyes are a great form of identification, only if they can't be replaced. Sure, it'd be great until someone figured out how to remove, replace, or alter it.
     Now before anyone suggests it, even if another, equally long and confusing string of numbers replaced the idea of a social security number, the idea still holds. Such a number would come to work like a social security number. Or even if it didn't, the kind of information that you'd have access to would still be prodigious. Easily enough to fake being someone else. Why? The information doesn't come with the chip. It's somewhere else. The chip is just a way of getting to that information. Clearly, if it were used for anything more than just name and age, then the amount of information accessible would expand. An ID would have to simply be an ID and nothing more if you didn't want to deal with identity theft issues. And, even if you couldn't get loans with it, if you could rewrite your own chip (or replace it), they could pass as you when buying guns, alcohol, or porn. Even if they couldn't ruin you directly, they could still do enough damage to ruin your reputation, your credit, your medical information, etc. If you had a prescription for steroids someone could use your name to intercept them. The consequences would be disastrous.
     Beyond that, you have to wonder what percentage of the population would reject that (for medical reasons). There are plenty of people who I would imagine wouldn't be able to receive the chip due to medical complications. What would they do? I imagine that it'd be impossible to collar them, and allowing regular ID would defeat the whole point of the system. And even with a perfect, 100% non-rejectable system, how long could it last? Microchipping is an inexpensive investment as it should last for the life of your dog or cat (from here). Should? At most, an animal would live maybe 25 years (and that would be a very old animal). That would be at best a third of the average person's lifespan? And even then, it's a "should," not a "will." I can't imagine much of any system that would last someone's entire life inside their body.
     The only reason that I suggested that this is an argument that I can't win is because this sort of thing is because there is always a "well then maybe they will make a 100% non-rejectable, life-long implant ID that uses encryption technology that can't be broken, huh? What then!" Which, honestly, I couldn't argue against except that I wouldn't like it. This is just a list of limitations on a system. Theoretically these limitations could be overcome, and then there wouldn't be much argument against it, and though I could explain why, it's only blinding paranoia that would make me not want to do it. I guess I should probably link this in the forum thread... buh.