Becoming a Microchipped Cyborg

as of the recording here. Recently, this company called three Square Market made the news because they were moving forward with an interesting and some would say troublesome plan involving

employees getting microchip r F I D implants. Now, some headlines made it sound like this was a compulsory decision that you would come into work, you would clock in, go under the knife, and get a grain of rice sized microchip implanted under the skin between your thumb and your forefinger, and then your tracked for the rest of your life. Other headlines were a little less reactionary and gave a better indication of what the story was actually about.

But to really appreciate what this means and why it's happening. I thought it would be good to do a full episode about r f I D technology and the history of human microchipping, because, despite what some outlets claimed, this is not the first time a US employer offered up this option. In fact, the first example happened more than a decade ago, in two thousand and six. But we'll get there first. Let's talk about the concept of r f I D in the first place. The basic concept

is pretty simple. R f I D stands for radio frequency identification technology. It's a way to identify something wirelessly through radio frequency transmissions, and some would argue that this concept dates all the way back to World War Two, although obviously not in the form of r f I D D r f i D tags, but rather just

the concept of using radio frequencies to identify something. During World War Two, radar was proving its value as a detection and tracking tool for both the Axis and Allied powers. But one thing radar could not do was actually identify what it was tracking. So if you were a radar operator and you picked up a signal on your apparatus and indicated that there was a plane that was flying toward you. You couldn't be sure that the plane was

one of yours or one belonging to the enemy. And this, as it turns out, is a very important distinction during times of war. You kind of want to know is it one of ours one of theirs? And with basic radar all you got was a blip saying, whatever it is, it's coming this way. Now, the access powers came up with a kind of cluege way to get around this problem. German pilots would execute a role maneuver. As they approached

their home base. Radar operators would see that the radio signals that were bouncing back were being reflected in a different way over the course of the role, So the surface of the plane that was reflecting radio waves back to the radar operators was changing because the orientation of the plane itself was changing. By establishing this specific maneuver when approaching a home base, they were able to distinguish

the German planes from other planes. So the radar signals themselves would hit different parts of the planes as they completed their roles that would be reflected in those returning signals, and in that way, German radar operators would know who was coming towards them, and thus they wouldn't launch an attack against their own planes. Over on the Allied side, there was a very secret operation in which British pilots had their planes outfitted with an active I f F system.

I f F in this case stands for Identify Friend or foe. This was a transmitter, uh specifically a transponder. It would activate only when it came within range of an outgoing signal from a base, and then it would transmit a signal of its own, indicating that the plane belonged to the Allies. So transponders are transmitters and responders. They respond to an incoming signal with their own signal, and that way British radar operators knew it was one

of their own boys coming back. Whenever they sent out a signal and this one returned to them. If it didn't return to them, they would know that chances are it was an enemy plane on its way in. Now, this concept of using radio waves as a means of identification is the very heart of r F I D, though the implementation of r F I D is a little bit different. The first r F I D patents were filed in nineteen seventy three. One of them was by Mario W. Cardulo, who filed a patent for rewriteable

r F I D tags. Charles Walton also filed and received a patent for a door lock system in which a passive transponder would respond to an active reader to unlock a door. The active reader would send out signals. When the passive transponder would come in within range, it would return a signal, and that returning signal would tell the scanner, Hey, this guy's got a key for the door. Unlocked the door. It's the essential basis for card based security doors that we use today. But that leads us

to another question. What exactly is a transponder? You know those devices in those British planes were transponders. Essentially, the ones inside these cards were transponders. They received radio signals, they transmit a different signal. It is a combination of transmitter and responder. But the ones in the British planes were different from the ones in the cards. They were larger for one thing, but they were also active transponders. That means that they relied on a power source inside

the plane and that would boost the outgoing signal. It's kind of like an amplifier. They were actively transmitting their signal to those radar operators, but they're also passive transponders, like in the case of that card. These harvest energy from incoming radio waves sent out by the signal generator, the reader in other words, that security reader that's typically mounted on a wall somewhere. Then they respond with their own signal by harvesting that energy and generating the return signal.

The more on that in a minute, We'll get into the mechanics, or or rather the technical aspects of that a little bit later on. Early uses of r f I D technology included not just simple locking mechanism for doors, but for stuff that could have an impact on national security, like nuclear materials. Los Alamos National Laboratory developed an r f I D tracking system for such material at the

behest of the Energy Department in the United States. Trucks shipping nuclear materials were to carry a transponder that would respond to readers at gated facilities, So a signal sent out from the reader at the gate would activate the transponders aboard the trucks. Those transponders would then send a and identifying signal back. That signal would carry information with it like the identity of the truck, what it was carrying, and sometimes even the person who was assigned to drive

the vehicle. Eventually, this proprietary system became a commercial product and it was put to use in the civilian world, often as part of a toll system for bridges and tunnels and that sort of thing. Los Alamos also created a passive r f I D tag system to track cows. It's one of the elighest implementations of r f I D tags was to track cows, and it was to make it easier to keep track of those cows as

they received various vaccinations and injections. The tax system allowed farmers to keep track of which cows had received the treatments and avoid double dosing or missing a cow. That we're now talking about microchipping employees, and we were originally talking about tracking cows seems a little poetic to me, but maybe that's the cynical side of me showing. Now. Over time, technologies with r f I D became smaller and more efficient, which led us to the possibility of

microchipping things like our pets and even ourselves. The person credited with having the first r F I D implant is Kevin Warwick, a British scientists sometimes referred to as a cyborg, though personally I thought that was going a bit far now. Warwick's implant interacted with various electronic systems in his office, including office lights and doors. It was only a temporary arrangement. He only had the implant for a short time I think maybe a week and a

half or so before he had it removed. He underwent another surgery later on with a slightly more sophisticated implant that was a little bit more than just an r F I D chip. But I did a full tech stuff episode about him in the past. The important thing to point out here is that this happened in nearly twenty years ago, when we had the first human getting a microchip, totally voluntary and mostly as kind of a proof of concept to show what could be possible in

the future. This idea of having an electronic component to your identity and it's always with you, and it allows you to interact with your environment in interesting ways, and you don't have to use things like passwords or other types of authentication in order to get access to various

systems or interact with things like lighting or other technology. Now, the first story I saw about employees electing to get microchips as part of their work did not happen in TV, as some headlines have stated where they say this is the first time ever. It happened in two thousand six. That's when two employees of a company called city watcher

dot Com elected to do this. City watcher dot Com is a surveillance equipment company, and these two employees elected to have r F I D microchips implanted in their forearms. They're a little bit bigger. They were about twice the length of the ones that have been talked about for three square Market. Now, the tags that the city watcher dot com employees got gave them access to special vaults.

It was essentially a security measure, and those special vaults contain sensitive client information like surveillance footage and other stuff that you wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands. Now, it's a lot harder and honestly a lot more grim to steal someone's arm than it is to steal, say a security card. So story a three square market is not unique. It has happened before, not on as large as scale as what three Square Market is hoping to do, but it certainly is not brand new. But what is

going on with three Square Market? Well, first of all, the company is in the business of making vending services. They make micro markets for one thing. Now, a typical micro market kind of looks like a simple refrigerated display that you might see in a grocery store, and it contains stuff like sandwiches or salads and drinks that kind of the stuff. And as a customer, you typically pick

up an item from this display. You would go to a kiosk that would be part of the display, and you would enter in the item that you wanted to buy, perhaps scanning it. A lot of them have optical scanners attached to them, and then you would use the kiosk to pay for this item. Typically you would use a credit hard maybe it's a tap credit card, or maybe it's a chip and pen, but however you would do it.

You would interact with the device in this way. Uh then you go on your merryway and you'd eat your snack. At some point, some companies contract with three Square Market to provide these sorts of vending machines in their break rooms. How stuff works isn't one of them. But then we also have a lot of free snacks, so I really

can't complain on that. On that front, three Square Market is now giving employees the option to have an r F I D microchip implanted in their hands to get somewhere around the between the thumb and four finger area. As I understand it now, those implants would allow employees to do a lot of different things without ever having to fish for various security cards or dongoles or credit cards. For example, they could be used to purchase items in

the break room micro market. You just stroll up to it, grab a tagged Cobs salad, and then the system would I detect that r f I D chip in your hand and charge it to your account, so you don't have to fish for a credit card or put any information in It's all automated and it's seamless. Other implementations could include the stuff we've talked about already, things like

getting access to security doors. You know, you just hold your hand up close to the reader and it picks up on the transponder signal and thus unlocks the door for you. Or you might use it to unlock computers so that you don't have to use a password. It just identifies that you are, in fact the person you say you are. Essentially, you could program the r F I D chip to hold information linked to the respective

employees identity. That information could then be linked to other data on the back end, So in other words, you don't necessarily have to encode everything that the chip will be able to do on the actual chip. You just have to establish a unique identifier, and then on the back end you could have all the functionality so that when it came into contact with that unique identifier, it

would spawned in the appropriate way. So for example, if I have a microchip and I have access to every door but one in this office, then when I come to that one forbidden door, it won't activate, not because that door wasn't programmed in my microchip, but because in the back end computer system, when it looks for the numbers that are associated with the access level for that door, it does not find my number, and thus I do not get access. So it really just means where do

you put the work? Do you put it on the chip side or on the back end side. Now you could just put a tag inside a piece of equipment and have the employee carry that around like a wrist band or something. You don't have to implant it in an inside a person. Although if it is i'mplanted in a person, it does decrease the possibility that you will misplace it. It doesn't completely eliminate it. There are gruesome accidents that can happen, but it's severely reduces that risk.

And it is also important to remember that that backside approach, the having the back end handle most of the work. It's pretty important when you're talking about a a method that might involve surgery, even if it's minor surgery to get a microchip implanted under the skin. Obviously, if it's a type of r F I D where you would need to switch it out in order to get more access, that requires another surgery, something that a lot of people

probably wouldn't look forward to. Now, this process is completely voluntary. They are not compelling any of their employees to undergo the surgery, and according to The New York Times, about fifty of the eighty employees of three Square Market have already signed up for the procedure. The company also states that the technology will not be used to track employee movements and activities, but obviously those are things people should

be concerned about. There are potential misuses of this technology that pose very real threats to privacy and security. I'll cover more on that in just a little bit. Now, before I get all doom and gloom, I've got a lot of other things I want to say about how r F i D technology actually works. But first let's

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, I'm going to really just concentrate on what are called passive r f i D systems here, because active and semi passive r f i D systems tend to use batteries. That makes those tags much larger and not practical for lots of implementations, including implants. You don't want to have to have a battery implanted underneath your skin if you don't if you don't absolutely need it for some medical purpose. So we're really looking at passive r f i D.

And this idea kind of goes back to radar. You have a reader or a scanner. Typically these devices are just constantly sending out a radio signal of a specific frequency. Early implantable passive r f i D systems used low frequency radio signals that around a hundred twenty five killer hurts.

These were small enough to work as implants for cows, but they had a limited range and low data transfer rates, so if you wanted something that worked at a better range and had faster throughput, you needed to use a higher frequency. So the next generation of r F I D tags moved to that part of the electro magnetic spectrum at the thirteen point five six mega Hurts range. Number hurts is telling you how many UH waves passed

through a given point within a second. Every hurts represents one wave for that second, so h hurts tells you that a hundred twenty five thousand of those wavelengths past a given point within a second. Thirteen point five six tells you thirteen point five six million hurts. Because it's mega hurts past that given point within a second. That means the wavelengths are significantly smaller and the frequency is much higher the range, and that frequency is mostly unregulated

and unused throughout the world. There are very few places that have that says, aside for specific reasons, so there was little worry about interference. Using thirteen point five six mega hurts is the range for r f I D tags, and it also offered a better read range and faster data transfer rates than the lower frequency r f I D tags. This frequency is used for lots of access systems,

whether it's a door or a computer terminal. They're also used in lots of payment systems and contactless smart card systems. So you might find a system running on this frequency, that is, for a subway. You might have a subway card and you tap it against a little UH sensor and it ends up completing this transaction that allows you to pass through and it deducts, however much from your account, or if you have an account that is based on a certain amount of time, then as long as you're

within that time limit, you're allowed to pass through. Anti THEFTO heisis in. Some cars also use this as a reader inside the car will scan for a returning signal from a transponder contained within a plastic key housing. UM. I have a car, it's like, well, my wife has a car that's like this, where it's not gonna go anywhere if it doesn't have the actual one of the actual keys inside the car. UM, if it doesn't detect

that key, it won't turn on. Also, if you try to leave the car with one of the keys inside it, it will tell you because it can detect the fact that the key is still there while you are obviously trying to walk off to get into Wally World, which by the way, is closed. The moose outside should have told you. In the ninety nineties, IBM began to work on ultra high frequency or UHF r f i D systems.

These had a read range of around twenty feet, which is pretty strong, and it had even faster data transfer rates than the Mega Hurts range. This technology has found its way into various warehouses around the world and is used as a sort of inventory management system. In Amazon announced a partnership with the r F I D Lab at Auburn University to explore ways to use r F

I D tags to optimize Amazon fulfillment centers. Those tags would help these centers keep an accurate count on what was and wasn't in stock at any given time, and thus help Amazon fulfill orders and make delivery times. Warehouse inventory is insanely complicated stuff because you've got new merchandise moving in and orders moving out constantly, so keeping an accurate inventory record is crucial if you want to meet

incoming orders. As for how it's working at all, it comes down to two critical components on the tag itself and antenna and the transponder, And it helps if we take a quick refresher on radio here. So let's say you want to transmit a radio signal and you've got a scanner or a reader, or in the case of traditional radio, you've got a broadcast station. You would create an electrical signal, you would modulate it in some particular way to create the frequency you want, and you would

send this signal into a transmission antenna. The electrical current running through the antenna will generate electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves. Radio waves will travel outward from the source the receiving antenna you use the radio or r F I D tag. The antenna itself has to be the right length to pick up those frequencies. If you were to take a traditional radio, it would most

likely have two antennas. You'd have one antenna that would be the FM antenna, which an old radio has tended to be a telescoping antenna that you would extend from the set, and then you would have an AM antenna, and that usually was a wire, a much much longer wire than the FM antenna, and normally it would even be contained with inside the radio itself, so it would just be a coil of wire that's wrapped up inside

the radio. You can't even see it. Some radios or sets did have that wire extend out from the radio, but that ends up becoming a tripping hazard. Now, the reason that you would have two different lengths of antenna is that the radio wavelengths of FM and AM are very different. AM radio waves are much longer than FM radio waves, so the antenna for a M has to

be longer to pick up those frequencies effectively. Generally speaking, the antenna's length needs to be about half a wavelength of the radio wave itself, or it could be a quarter of the length of the wavelength itself in order to effectively pick up the signal. So if you've got a signal that's a meter long, ideally you would have an antenna that's half a meter long in order to pick up that signal. That was just a random example, by the way. So let's say that you want to

build a very simple radio. You could get an antenna, which could just be some copper wire that will pick up radio frequencies within a certain range based upon the length of the antenna itself. Um, you would have to have antenna that's long enough for it to pick up a M frequencies. This really works with a M radio. Now, when it encounters this electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves, those will induce an electric current to flow

through the antenna. It makes electrons wiggle, essentially moving back and forth along the length of that antenna. If you've listened to my episodes about electromagnetism and electricity, this is gonna sound really familiar to you, as it's essentially the same sort of thing that kind of happens. Uh, well, it doesn't kind of happen. It's kind of like the thing that happens when you move a conductor through a

magnetic field that induces current to flow. It's not dissimilar to that, except now we're talking about radio waves, not magnetism, not a magnetic field, but it also can induce current to flow through that antenna. Now, technically you don't need any sort of power source to make a simple working AM radio. You can make what is called a crystal radio. You need an antenna, a tuner, and a crystal earpiece and a diode as well. The tuner allows you to

select a specific frequency. Otherwise you would get all available A M signals simultaneously and you wouldn't really be able to make anything out unless you only had one signal nearby that you could pick up. So the tuner helps you tune in on a specific frequency. The earpiece has the crystal in it. It's a piece of electric crystal.

These are crystals that vibrate when electric current is applied to them, so by applying a varying electric current, you can make them vibrate at different frequencies, which in turn makes sound. Now, someday I may do a video to actually show how to build a crystal radio and explain how each of these little parts work, because it's pretty fascinating stuff to really see how a very simple radio works.

But for now we're just going to use it as a general example, largely because without the benefit of visual aids, it gets really tricky to explain this stuff without it

getting too confusing, at least for me. Anyway, that simple crystal radio is lacking something that your typical radios and stereos have which is a power source, or at least a power source that you plug into, either as a battery or plugging into an outlet us because all the energy you need to hear what the radio is playing is coming from that electromagnetic radiation, inducing a current to

flow through your simple radio. Depending upon the transmitting stations, broadcast power, and your distance from that broadcast station, the volume could be pretty low. It might even be difficult for you to detect. But if you're close enough and the radio station is powerful enough, you'll be able to hear what it's transmitting. Even without any other power source.

You're effectively harvesting energy from the radio waves themselves. This process, by the way, has led some people to propose energy systems that would harvest electricity from radio waves in general, the thought being radio waves are all around us all the time, why don't we have special antenna to capture that energy and convert it into electricity. But those systems

have some really big limitations. For one thing, the amount of electricity you harvest depends heavily on that transmission power from the transmission station and how far away from it you happen to be, so as you double your distance from a radio source, the power of the radio signal reaching you is one quarter of what it was before.

It's the inverse square law. Now. Based on that alone, it would mean you'd have to be very close to several powerful transmitting stations if you wanted to harvest a significant amount of energy, And that also means you have to pump a huge amount of energy into the actual transmission part of the system. So it's not an efficient means of transmitting energy. It is possible, but it's not practical,

not as a means of actually transmitting energy itself. It's pretty cool, but again, if you're trying to pump that much energy into a transmitter, you're on the losing side because you you lose so much energy over distance that it's just not worth it. But back to r f I D tags. They contain an antenna. Uh, it might be wire, it might be conductive ink. It all depends

upon the implementation of the tag itself. But that antenna will pick up the frequencies given off by whatever the respective scanner or reader is, whatever it was designed for, when that frequency hits the antenna, so it's it's being omitted by a reader. The frequency comes out, it hits the r f I D tag, hits that antenna. That induces a current in the antenna which powers the transponder.

The transponder has been programmed with information. It may just modulate the UH, the frequency that's receiving, and then send back that modulated signal. The scanner detects that because it has its own antenna that's looking for those echoes, and thus you are able to transmit information from what is a passive system to the active reader. Early are F I D tags could only contain nineties six bits of information.

Remember a bit is a zero or a one, and early r f I D tags could only hold nine six bits zeros and ones in a row, and that's it. It's not very much, but since you can use those ninety six bits to assign a unique identify R and then you could do all the heavy lifting on the back end of the system, it's enough. Later r f I D tax could hold up to a couple of kilobytes of data, so they were able to expand on that dramatically. There are three general types of r f

I D data storage strategies. There's read only, which means that the data that's on the tag is unalterable. You can read it, but you can't write to it. It's hard coded on the R F I D tag itself and will remain the same forever and ever, assuming the tag remains viable. Then there's read write tags. That means you can overwrite and alter the information that's on the tag, and you can do that to your heart's content. You can wipe it, change it, tweak it, you can put

a brand new thing on there. And finally you have worm tags. That's w O r M. It's an acronym that stands for right once read many. That means you have a tag that you can change precisely. One time you write to the tag, you can alter it once, and after you change it that one time, it behaves as a read only tag. These tags could end up being the future of shopping. It requires getting the price down low enough so that it's an economical solution, but it's got a lot of uses, like what we alluded

to earlier with inventory management. Let's take a hypothetical situation, one that has some practical implementations in the real world already. So let's say you walk into the supermarket of the future. It's probably owned by Amazon. At that point, you head over to the dairy section and you pick up a

dozen eggs. You pause for a moment to wonder why eggs are with dairy because they come from a chicken, and you can't milk a chicken, at least not in the state of Georgia, because I have been expressly told to stop trying whenever I visit my hometown of Gainesville. It's poultry capital of the world. But that's a tangent for another day. You pick up a carton of eggs. The eggs have an r f I D tag on the package itself. The tag maybe it's a shiny sticker

which houses both the antenna and the transponder. You bring your smartphone up near this tag. Now, your smartphone happens to be equipped with near field communication or NFC technology, which can interact with passive r F I D chips, and so your phone can act like a scanner. Your phone ends up interacting, gets the signal back from the carton, and it shows you lots of information about the eggs. It might show you how fresh the eggs are, how much they cost, how much that breaks down per egg.

Maybe you even get other information like where did those eggs come from? What farm did they come from? And this is true for all the stuff you can shop for. Every item has its own r F I D tag that gives its own unique information, and therefore you are able to learn more about those products. Uh. Then you load up your cart with eggs and I don't know, motor oil or something, and you walk right out of the supermarket to your car. You don't go to the

cash register. There is no cash register. It's because there are scanners at the entrance to the supermarket and as you walk by them, they pick up on the r F I D tags of all the products that are in your cart, and they also pick up information on your smartphone or maybe a dongle that you carry as a customer of this particular Amazon owned grocery store chain. And as you leave the store, the system counts this

as a purchase. It says, these items have left the store, this person has purchased those and it will run the purchase against your account, so you are charged the appropriate amount based upon the products that are in your cart. It's seamless to you, and it's all happening through radio frequency transmissions behind the scenes. Now that's how it might work in the future. The current concept stores, which are called Amazon Go, reportedly do not rely on r f

i D technology at this time. Now that's according to Amazon, but the company has not gone so far as to explain what actually is happening on the technology side of their Amazon Go stores. But they are talking about being interested in using r f i D chip technology in the future. So an r f i D enabled store would essentially do the same thing that Amazon Go is doing. But what about you know, other items, like what what are the other considerations with r f I D technology.

That's how it would affect the consumer, But how's it effect in other realms of the world. Well, we'll explore that in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we just described what it's like from the customer side of things to walk into that shopping center of the future, but on the store side, there's a lot more going on.

So while you are walking out with your eggsit motor oil, the store can track with recision how many units of any given product are available in the store at any given time. It knows the full inventory of the store. UH. It can also track trends, such as if there's an increase in demand for one product versus another. Let's say

everyone's getting motor oil this week. It can track that and perhaps even respond dynamically by placing orders for new shipments of those products to be delivered to the store in order to replenish depleted stocks. Maybe it is able to run specials so that it can entice even more

people in. It could keep track of freshness dates on various produce so that way items that are getting close to expiring can be cleared away and replaced with new items and you don't have spoil edge sitting on your shelves.

It can also provide data that might change what items are ordered entirely because let's say a long time has gone by since someone has bought a Guatemalan insanity pepper, for example, the storm might stop ordering Guatemalan and sandy peppers entirely to free up space for something else and avoid wasting food. Now, one thing that would make this easier is a standardized language for shopping, and that's kind of the motivation behind something called the Electronic Product Code

or EPC. This is a universal standard for identifying every physical object. It's not tied to any specific technology, so it's not unique to r f i D technology, but it is often talked about in concert with r f I D tags. A universal standard would mean you wouldn't need dozens of different apps to interpret the r f I D identify IRS on products at all different stores you go to, for example, because the r f i D tags used by those stores would rely upon a

common coding system. And this wouldn't just be for the stuff you encounter in stores, but all sorts of stuff to end up inside things we buy. For example, computers are made up of lots of parts like a motherboard, CPU, graphics card, power source. All these sorts of things those components. Each of those would have its own unique designation with EPC, which makes it much easier to track supply chains. The same thing is true with say cars, You would have

specific identifiers for every single component. That way you know at any given moment within your warehouse what you need, what you don't need, what you might have too much of UH, and be able to pull together all the parts you need for any given job. This code would be a designation, but the language it would be written in is something else. It would be a product markup language or PML, which is based on the extensible mark up which or x AML that you find on the web.

This would allow different computer systems running different implementations of different software packages to understand one another when referring to specific r f i D tags, very much the way that HTML can be read by browsers on different operating systems Unix, Windows, Mac, same sort of concept. You want something that is agnostic when it comes to operating systems. All right back to people and whether or not we

should be terrified about getting microchips implanted in US. There obviously are some big concerns about privacy and security here, so let's talk about privacy first. Now, it doesn't take a lot to imagine a world in which r f i D scanners are placed at regular intervals around the workplace tracking chipped employees, even if we're not talking about an implant here, but a security card or some sort

of bracelet or something along those lines. Assuming that every card contains a unique identifier that is associated with a specific employee, the results are the same. As employees move around the workspace, the system could track those movements you come within range of a scanner, it ends up marking down the time when you moved within range of that

particular scanner. It can actually effectively track your movements from one part of an environment to another, not in real time, but as in, you know, within this span of time it was in range of this one scanner and then moved on to the southern scanner, and so on and so forth. So you can kind of piece together and employees movements over the span of say a day. So now imagine that you have a busy body boss of

the future. Heck, let's say it's a robot and this robo boss is looking over the data and sees that Johnson, head of sales, is frequently away from her desk. So it robot boss analyzes Johnson's behavior over the course of several weeks and identifies patterns and looks at how much time she is spending away from where she usually sits. This has nothing to do with her job performance, of course, but it has to do with the expectation that she's going to be in her office more often than not

during working hours. And robo boss has really strict standards about these sort of things, or imagine a workplace where you're every trip to the break room or bathroom, or or just a quick jaunt outside to stretch your legs is logged and later used during your employee evaluation. It's not a very pleasant thought. And of course, there are some workplaces where you have to clock in every time you come back to your desk and clock out every

time you want to leave. This would be a system that would just track you whether you were actively doing that or not. It is completely possible to implement this sort of thing, and it could lead to some pretty unpleasant work conditions and the belief that it would lead to greater productivity. I, for one, submit that it does not lead to creator productivity to chain your employees to your desk, because it just decreases employee morale. Then there

are security issues. It's not just the privacy issues of the people who are carrying around these chips, but also security for the systems and for the people themselves. R have I D is by its nature, tied to the identity of something. It might be a person, could be an animal in the case of a pet, could be a product, and there are security concerns including identity, theft, tag readers can be a vulnerable point something that hackers

could potentially exploit. Tag readers are collecting data through that radio frequency communication. You might have someone spoof a tag reader, so in other words, they're using their own scanner to get hits back from r f I D chips and use that to attempt to steal identification information or pick up other valuable data. Or hackers might be able to clone own tags and thus get unauthorized access to buildings

or systems. So you might have an r f I D reader that is able to pull information off of, say a a security card that gives you access to a building, and then hackers could perhaps replicate that card with one of their own and get access to that building despite not being authorized to do so. Now, one way to mitigate that problem is through the use of encryption, in which the data retrieved by any spoof scanner is on its own, largely useless or difficult to decrypt. This

is the effect of finding a seemingly garbled message. It has no real meaning to you, and so intercepting the message provides you no value because you don't know what the message means. But there's also the back end communication within the system itself. You have to consider that's another attractive target for hackers, not just the people carrying around these r f i D tags, but the system that

ALEXA information itself. It's another vulnerable point and an attractive target because the back end captures all r f i D transmissions that move through the system, as opposed to

seeking out a specific target one at a time. So, in other words, instead of having to walk up to somebody and try and scan their card without them noticing, if I'm able to compromise the actual system, the scanning system itself, I'm getting all the information that comes into contact with that system, not just one instance of it. R f I D security is an evolving field, and like all types of security, it's a constant game of trying to stay ahead of those who would compromise the system.

And it involves lots of different strategies used in varying degrees and different combinations. So among some there's a healthy distrust of r f i D technology, and I would say that distrust is at least partly reasonable. R f i D is a technology that can be easily abused if you're not careful with it. Even if you assume a company is implementing the technology ethically. Errors can lead

to big problems, ranging from identity theft to unauthorized access. Now, this does not mean r F I D technology is bad or inherently flawed. It just means that any implementation needs to be done carefully and with transparency so that you avoid instances of abuse. As for the employees at three Square Market, I'll really be interested to follow their

experiences with these implants. I personally would probably not jump on this wagon if I were one of those employees, not because I would have a fear of abuse necessarily, but more because of not certain we won't have an alternative and possibly superior approach in the near future. It's kind of like going out and buying a brand new computer.

You might feel some reluctance because you know, by the time you get at home, a newer, more awesome computer is going to hit the store shelves and make your purchase obsolete. Well, anything that would make an implant obsolete would be a huge slap in the face. If I'm gonna undergo any kind of surgical procedure, I want to make sure that that decision is a good one. For a good long while. Ah. Now I'm curious about you, guys.

If you would end up taking on this approach, would you get an r f I d implant if it would mean that certain aspects of your lives would be more convenient and seamless, if you could get through security doors, you know, the appropriate ones, without having to carry an extra card or dongle of some sort, or if you were able to finally get that salad out of the micro vending machine and just walk away and everything would be taken care of. You wouldn't have to fiddle with

any cards or anything like that. Is that worth it? Do you? Or do you think that this technology is largely it should just remain the realm of products and maybe pet but not people. I go back and forth. I think a lot of this technology can be solved with something you carry, something you own, but obviously that raises security questions too, because if someone else gets hold of that something, they might also get access to all of those other systems. So what do you guys think?

Let me know? Send me a message my email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can always let me know on Twitter or Facebook the handle at both of those is tech Stuff HSW. That wraps it up for this episode. You guys have any suggestions for future episodes, contact me and why those ways I just mentioned, let me know what you think, And of course, you can always tune in at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff to watch me record these shows live.

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