I feel like the question to ask here is why? What on Earth are the benefits to implanting RFID chips into an employee to begin with that cannot be achieved via traditional means like badges or smart cards?
This seems like a huge hassle for employees themselves, especially if they decide to change employers and both for whatever reason want you to be chipped - so now you have multiple chips implanted or have to remove one and replace it with another. Again, for what benefit?
I'm not even going to get into tinfoil hat privacy territory, because it's not like these are going to be active RFID chips so they'll need to be in close proximity of a reader to be picked up. Worries like that are as far fetched as the people who think the government is spying on you using RFID equipped credit cards or transit passes (which annoyingly has led to most wallets these days having a small faraday cage woven into them, I literally couldn't find a wallet I liked a couple months ago that didn't have some RFID-blocking feature and it drives me nuts).
I wouldn't think changing jobs requires changing the chip. The original employer can simply mark ID#x as being invalid for access, and the new employer can mark ID#x as being valid.
That's not to say I'm for this. I'm reading the article, and I'm going WTF UK? _1984_ and _Brave New World_ were warnings, not manuals!
While there is an ISO standard for pet chips, there are several competing versions that are also in use. I think my vet said there were 3 or 4 different kinds and each had a different kind of reader.
There's three different frequencies commonly used in microchips for pets: 125, 128, and 134.2 KHz (the last being the ISO standard). Hope your local animal shelter has a universal chip reader, because I doubt your vet knows whether the chips they use are standards-compliant or not.
ISO standards would be the least of my concerns given how common it is for implanted pet chips to migrate around the body and end up in the dog's leg etc.
I don’t think an employer who treats their staff like that or wishes to is worth working for.
Trust works both ways.
Yes there are people who tread water and do little, this happens in any organisation past a certain size and they need to be encouraged or weeded out. But openly treating your staff like cattle is a sure fire way to kill any good will your staff have towards you.
An interesting question to ask is - would the executives submit to this? And would they be happy being judged by those criteria?
I’m not even going to be polite about it, any employer who feels the need to micromanage and audit their employees to this degree can go right to hell.
If anyone wanted to know the exact time I was in the bathroom and when I would tell them to go screw themselves and turn in my resignation.
I thought privacy concerns around RFID payment and identification were more to do with abuse by private parties, like recording, spoofing/replay attacks, or just private collection. I think I remember some emphasis in early press coverage of e-passports on the idea that they would only be scan-able when opened, (although I'm not sure if that is either true, or helpful). So I guess State Dept. was concerned enough to discuss it.
It is common knowledge that large scale industrial surveillance exists, and contributes to fraud as a side effect. In such an environment, privacy concerns about RFID in payment and govt. ID cards hardly seem so outlandish that they should be dismissed out of hand.
> I thought privacy concerns around RFID payment and identification were more to do with abuse by private parties, like recording, spoofing/replay attacks, or just private collection.
Those are all legitimate concerns, though ultimately a well designed solution would use NFC smartcard emulation with a properly designed applet to alleviate these issues.
Unfortunately, most of the time I see people online wanting to figure out how to block RFID signals from their cards it's because they think they can be read from a distance much greater than a couple mm away from the card.
>> I feel like the question to ask here is why? What on Earth are the benefits to implanting RFID chips into an employee to begin with that cannot be achieved via traditional means like badges or smart cards?
They own you for the $200-$400! Like having an MS13 tattoo all over your face...what gang are you going to be with for life? Raises cost absolutely.
https://www.businessinsider.com/economic-reason-for-gang-mem...
"If you picture one of these gangs in El Salvador, where many of the members have tattoos, literally from head to toe, it's much much harder for those employees to go and find a job somewhere else,"
Probably easier. If the employee is willing to roll over so much to perform minor surgery, they have a mentality that would be adored in many other places.
> What on Earth are the benefits to implanting RFID chips into an employee to begin with that cannot be achieved via traditional means like badges or smart cards?
No fan of the technology per-se, but presumably they can't be lost or stolen.
As someone who has had to manage access cards before I would think it is a cost saving measure. The amount of users who lose their cards several times a year is surprisingly large.
Not to mention that the users also tend to lend them out and swap them.
This seems like a huge hassle for employees themselves, especially if they decide to change employers and both for whatever reason want you to be chipped - so now you have multiple chips implanted or have to remove one and replace it with another. Again, for what benefit?
I'm not even going to get into tinfoil hat privacy territory, because it's not like these are going to be active RFID chips so they'll need to be in close proximity of a reader to be picked up. Worries like that are as far fetched as the people who think the government is spying on you using RFID equipped credit cards or transit passes (which annoyingly has led to most wallets these days having a small faraday cage woven into them, I literally couldn't find a wallet I liked a couple months ago that didn't have some RFID-blocking feature and it drives me nuts).