There was a push for #RFID #Technology back in the 1990s. The test markets were in the Midwest, and met with unexpectedly severe blowback. The fundamentalist Christian view was that the chips were too much like the biblical ''mark of the beast'' because they were supposed to be implanted into the hand to identify employees and consumers. Believe what you want. Privacy fighters take what they can get. When I was a kid the blowback was severe enough I was still hearing about this around the 2012 end-of-world panic, so I did research to figure out what was really going on. Despite persistent low-scale marketing efforts, the company with the patent pivoted to website certificate management. :thisisfine:
The only thing I knew about the :CIAverified: is all of this was being blamed on them. Then there was a night little-kid me ran into an honest desk jockey for them. Of course I asked him about #VeriChip. He got an expression on his face like I'd brought up the most socially-toxic aspect of his work. What he said came down to three things that stuck in my mind. :rainbowthink:
''Yeah, there are some younger folk who think that would be a good idea, but the rest of us are trying to stop them.'' ''Whenever you want to put something in the public's bodies there's a really bad reaction.'' ''We can just accomplish all of that with biometrics anyway, but the younger employees who push for the cups want to make money selling the chips.'' I didn't know what "biometrics" meant, so I asked, and he explained how eye scans worked at the time, thumb print as #ID , and the prospect of then-in-its-infancy gait analysis. His issue wasn't my #Privacy being violated, his view was closer to, ''we already have cameras everywhere, so why put something in the body if you don't have to.'' :yikes:
#TechnologyNews #LuxuryLiving #CounterfeitGoods #Counterfeiting #Coubterfeit #LawEnforcement #TradeMark #UnfairCompetition
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/former-tesla-product-manager-wants-to-make-luxury-goods-impossible-to-fake-starting-with-a-chip