
Wisconsin company to offer microchip implants to its employees - rmason
http://kstp.com/news/wisconsin-company-to-implant-microchips-in-employees-three-square-market/4549459/
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mic47
Can someone explain why people prefer implants over rings? Functionality wise
it's same: read on RFID tag, maybe with some light computation.

People wear rings all the time, application is painless, easy to change once
compromised or if there is a new model, and provides same features. Chips
would have advantage if they would provide better IO, but currently they
don't.

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smhg
I guess if you want 100% 'coverage' an implant wins. A ring could still be
forgotten.

But I agree the disadvantages of the implant make the ring sound better.

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lrvick
I have had NFC rings and I have gone through a few of them because they break
or fall apart, particularly when I would need them most.

Thankfully I have 2 NFC implants so it has been no big.

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roel_v
Meh. I got an rfid implant in 2010 ish, but took it out after a few years
because there were so few benefits. If there was a universal standard maybe,
or if the range was > 10 cm, or if it had more than a few bytes of memory. I
think most people who got a chip implant over the last 10 years came to the
same conclusion. The only applications that show up in the press every now and
then are like this - for payments. But never something that is widely
available.

It's great to get yourself labeled a freak though. I got mine done in a a
piercing shop, and when I walked in, the place was full with people with
dozens of facial piercings, stretched earlobes and full arm and neck tattoos.
But as soon as I mentioned the chip implant and showed that I was serious by
showing the actual one I wanted put in, they all started murmuring and looking
at me like I was send back in time from the year 2210. The owner wasn't sure
how to feel when I pulled out a laptop and rfid reader and grinned like an
idiot when I successfully logged on to the machine by waving my hand over the
reader.

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owenversteeg
Got rid of it? Why not just leave it in?

Also, I think you can get chips with kilobytes of memory easily. Sure, not
enough to store too much data on there, but fairly reasonable for a bunch of
stuff.

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roel_v
Well it was still a foreign thing floating around in my hand. Back then I
still trained bjj/mma and I was always slightly nervous it would break or
pinch a muscle or something. Since it was of no use anyway, I figured it'd be
better to take it out.

Re: memory, what would be a useful use case for having a few kb of data under
your skin? It's not enough to store e.g. crucial documents, plus you need a
custom reader.

When I got it, I thought 'uses will pop up when I have one'. Turns out they
didn't, and it wasn't for lack of trying. Most people have come to the same
conclusion.

(Amal Graafstra, one of the earliest people who did it and blogged about it,
made a career out of it - but that's only realistic for the first person to do
it)

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tzs
Two things I'd want to know before even entertaining the idea:

1\. Are these safe during an MRI?

From what I've been able to find some chips seem fine during an MRI (Kari of
MythBusters had one implanted and had an MRI done with no problems on an
episode), but the FDA lists MRI incompatibility as a potential health concern
for chip implants.

At least one manufacturer that says their chips are safe for MRI do say that
people undergoing an MRI with their chips need to be continually monitored
visually and aurally and told to alert the operate if the feel anything
unusual, and patients who are sedated or anesthetized or confused should not
be given MRIs.

2\. Will these show up during the security check at airports? I dislike
commercial air travel to the point that I have no intention of ever taking it
again, but if I do, or if these oppressive security theater shows get extended
to other forms of transit that I'm still currently open to, I don't like the
idea of something that might trigger more extensive screening.

Bonus concern: how standardized is this stuff? If implanted chips for
payments, opening doors, etc., take off and all kinds of places support them,
is one chip enough or am I going to need one to unlock my office, one for my
home, one for my car, one to pay via my credit card account (or worse, a
separate one corresponding to each credit card account), one for buses, one
for each store's rewards program, and so on?

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Bartweiss
> how standardized is this stuff?

Yeah, this is a good question. Something Visa-level reliable might make sense,
conditional on your other questions. But getting the Discover implant that
doesn't work most places? Or the Diner's Club implant that's the first big
player but fades in popularity?

I don't really want to take sides in a format war using my own body.

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snuxoll
There's literally only one time I've tried to use a Discover card and not been
able to, and it was a local DQ franchise (yet they still took amex?). My
wife's daily driver is her Discover It card, and even traveling to small rural
towns she's never been in a situation where she had to break out her shelved
Visa cards.

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Bartweiss
Huh... Now I'm confused, I seem to see them fail maybe 20% of the time,
anywhere except the biggest cities. Maybe it's regional?

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snuxoll
That's possible, but both here in Idaho where we live and Mass. where we went
for Red Hat Summit this year my wife hasn't had issues using her discover card
aside from at that one DQ franchise.

I know many years ago on various credit forums the joke was always that
Discover has really bad acceptance rates, but generally speaking I'm much more
likely to see a business decline to take an AmEx than Discover assuming they
take credit cards at all. Discover's transaction fees are extremely similar to
Visa and MC, and most merchant accounts handle it without issue so why not
take it?

Personally from a cardholder point of view, my wife loves her Discover card
because they're the only bank she has a card with that doesn't make her wade
through phone menus only to get routed to some outsourced call center 1/2 the
time - having the first option presented when you call being "press 0 to talk
to somebody" and always getting an American support representative is pretty
awesome.

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nmstoker
The justifications for this are so utterly marginal. I'm sure some could
benefit but it's vanishingly few people who will.

A ring (as others suggest) gets you most of the benefits - and maybe rings
have the downside of being forgotten, but I've left my work passcard a few
times over the years and it's not the end of the world... Not so bad I'd
prefer a minor surgical procedure! And the supposed advantage of not getting
it caught in things? I might change my mind when I personally know five people
who've lost limbs, but right now I know zero people who lost limbs...

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Bartweiss
> And the supposed advantage of not getting it caught in things?

There are definitely people who take off their rings regularly, like
electricians and climbers. But even then, I virtually never hear about them
_losing_ rings, and they can put them on any time they'd be shopping. I'm
really missing the advantage here.

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dotemacs
I remember talking to an ex colleague who worked for now no longer relevant
mobile operator, about the setup his colleagues had who worked in Korea:

\- they were required to have their "tags" on them all the time as it opened
door and things like that...

\- but they were also timed on when and how long their toilet breaks were. Or
if they went to the canteen too early or stayed too long for their lunch. For
all the "offences" their pay was docked.

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struppi
OK, maybe I'm old or old-fashioned or just not creative enough...

But what exactly are the advantages of this implant over NFC-cards or
something like Apple Pay? That I cannot forget my card or my phone? I don't
even know when this last happened to me...

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mseebach
Hygiene and safety, I would guess. A card in a lanyard can get caught up in
all sorts of machinery and even a wristband can be slightly difficult to keep
clean.

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dovdovdov
Um, almost the same applies to hands and arms.

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cyphar
I don't know about you, but my body's sense of proprioception[1] doesn't
extend to lanyards or other things attached to my clothing.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception)

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dovdovdov
Yeah, but getting your arm ripped off by some machinery is also rarely
deliberate.

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Teever
I think the fact that you're arguing this shows that you've never worked
around heavy machinery.

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rbanffy
Funny they think GPS tracking is the problem with this.

The problem is that it's a way to check your identity even if you'd prefer not
to voluntarily provide it. I can scan you as you pass our flower pots without
your knowledge and, even if, at first, I can't identify you, with time I will.

And by then you won't be able to easily remove the implant.

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hodgesrm
Facial recognition is improving so rapidly that having an extra microchip does
not seem to add much value for identifying people. It's simpler to get the
same information from cameras, which are ubiquitous. On the GPS side there's
all that location data streaming out of your cell phone, not to mention the
semantic information about what you are looking at/doing on the Internet.

There's a lot to be concerned in the privacy realm but many of the threats are
already implemented and getting more effective very quickly.

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rbanffy
Face recognition is not that great and can be defeated with some tricks (never
tried IR paint, but I guess it'd be effective at night). You can also leave
your phone in the car or at your house, or give it to someone else who'll be
you to those sensors.

It's much harder to detach (and reattach) your hand.

Also, I never volunteered to be tagged by facial recognition (except for my
passport) and these people are volunteering to be tagged.

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ourmandave
Someone asked "Why not a ring instead?" and someone mentioned they had the
imbed done by a tattoo shop full of people with piercings, etc.

So my thought was combine the two into an RFID nose ring or something.

But the downside is you'd have people swiping various body parts in checkout
lines. "It didn't go, try again. Wait, please don't try again."

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mattcoles
Good to know you can steal money from these employees with a handshake.

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malikNF
I was wondering the same thing. What happens if you find a hardware
fault/vulnerability, and the company has to recall the chips? Do you disable
it and leave it inside the person? Do you cut your hand to get it out? This is
a bit hilarious tbh.

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Cyberdelic
I liked the part about it being encrypted and secure. Uh-huh. At least until
one of these employees picks up something with an embedded RFID cloner... Even
if the underlying data in encrypted and considered unusable by the 'bad guy',
they can still use it in the encrypted form to impersonate the employee...
sooooo....

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Implants are great for both the novelty and the convenience, but I don't like
it being pitched as somehow being inherently more secure than a standard
access card or whatever (beyond it being more difficult to have your hand
stolen or misplaced).

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teilo
Queue fundies freaking out about the Mark of the Beast.

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therealidiot
How would/could this kind of stuff work with e.g. EMV / contactless payments?
Or, OpenPGP over NFC?

I've seen tons of RFID implantable chips which aren't that interesting, I've
also seen NFC ones but they just look to be read/write storage...

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ElijahLynn
Amazon Go figured out how to do this without implanting microchips in people.

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cwilson
The title is, of course, misleading. They are offering employees a microchip
implant. It's not required.

Still crazy that anyone would opt-in to do this, but a misleading headline all
the same.

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hgdsraj
I dunno, I'm surprised you thought it was mandatory. Pretty confident in the
state of Wisconsin you cannot force someone who does not have life threatening
ailments surgery.

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mrighele
The original title is "Wisconsin Company To Implant Microchips In Employees",
which is different from the current "Wisconsin Company To Offer To Implant
Microchips In Employees".

The difference is not so subtle; atfirst I assumed too that it was mandatory.

