Consider, for example, a proposal by Scott Silverman, CEO of VeriChip. In an interview on 16 May 2006 on Fox News Channel (a U.S. television network), he proposed implanting chips in immigrants and guest workers to assist the government in later identifying them. Shortly afterward, the Associated Press quoted President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia as telling a U.S. senator that he would agree to require Colombian citizens to be implanted with RFID chips before they could gain entry into the United States for seasonal work.

Guest workers might ostensibly consent to having chips implanted. But would chipping them be truly voluntary? Such “voluntary” actions may determine a person’s ability to earn a living, and the worker might not view the implantation as something he or she could refuse. What person facing poverty at home and given the prospect of a job in a different country would be in a position to argue? 

At a practical level, when chips are implanted in guest laborers, who pays for the cost of purchasing, implanting, and monitoring the chips in hundreds or thousands of poor migrants? If someone has an adverse reaction to the chip so that it has to be removed or replaced, who bears that cost? And who pays if the chips become obsolete or compromised by rampant cloning—the illicit duplication of the supposedly unique device—and have to be replaced? Affluent patrons of a trendy club might gladly pay to be chipped, but the situation would certainly be different for those pursuing temporary minimum-wage jobs in a foreign country.

Silverman made his proposal, that immigrants and guest workers be implanted with RFID chips, amid a national debate in the United States about illegal immigration, focusing on impoverished Latin Americans in search of work. But might Silverman’s proposition apply as well to electrical engineers or doctors, or other high-status individuals coming into the country for work? Who decides?

Mandating guest workers to have RFID chips implanted in their bodies for identification purposes strikes us as coercive and opportunistic. That approach makes the RFID chip a branding device similar to what a cowboy uses when he sears the haunches of his cattle or the tattoos that the Nazis forced on their victims in concentration camps. It goes against the widely held belief in basic human rights and might even be interpreted as a violation of Article 3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms everybody’s right to “life, liberty, and security of person.”

Social researchers are just beginning to study people’s attitudes to implanted RFID. Christine Perakslis and Robert Wolk at Bridgewater State University, in Massachusetts, questioned 141 college students on their feelings about implanted RFID. Respondents were asked if they would be willing to have an implant to prevent ID theft, to combat terrorism, for other national security reasons, as a life-saving device, or to ensure the safety of themselves and their families. About a third of the respondents were willing to be implanted, while less than half of them were not. Wolk and Perakslis’s subjects were the least comfortable with chipping as a cure for ID theft. The reasons that garnered the most support for getting chipped were to save their lives or to ensure the safety of their family.

Another small survey in 2003 by Starr Roxanne Hiltz, professor of information systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, and her colleagues found that 18 out of 23 people questioned objected to the idea of implantable chips as identification.

Some of the resistance has to do with feelings about modification to one’s body. “If they are putting something inside of you,” one respondent replied, “it’s like you’re changing yourself. It’s not right.” As the wide variety of acceptable and unacceptable piercings and tattoos found around the world attests, people of different backgrounds vary in their attitudes toward “changing yourself.”

Tattoos, an ID technology that is at least 4000 years old, share some key qualities with implanted RFID tags. Both could be used for the same ­purposes and are intended to be permanent—they can be removed, but only with some difficulty and not without assistance. The only differences are that, compared with a tattoo, an RFID chip is invisible, may be easier to read surreptitiously, and is a little more difficult to duplicate. Yet we suspect most people, regardless of their feelings toward being chipped, would balk at the idea of accepting a machine-readable tattoo as a means of identification, even if such an indelible marking had some personal or societal benefit.

If there were a societal benefit, could a government require individuals to modify their bodies? For public health purposes, the answer is yes. In the United States, for example, students must have certain immunizations before attending public school. But this example is the only instance we can think of. Could a health care–related implant such as the VeriChip tag become a public health imperative? Would that use lead down a slippery slope toward universal chipping? It seems unlikely.

VeriChip Corp. does not, in fact, advocate universal chipping for medical purposes. The company’s vice president of medical applications, Richard Seelig, estimates a U.S. market for VeriMed of 43 million to 45 million people—less than one-sixth of the population. This group is made up of people who are more likely than others to wind up in the emergency room. These include cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy; people with pace­makers or other medical implants; and those who might be suffering some sort of cognitive impairment or loss of consciousness due to epilepsy, diabetes, or Alzheimer’s disease.

Photo: Oran Barber/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Test Case: Dr. John Halamka [right] got chipped. He later helped expose a weakness in VeriChip’s security.

We believe that even Seelig’s estimates of the potential size of the market for patient identification are grossly exaggerated. “For certain subpopulations—Alzheimer’s patients, the mentally ill, people with communication difficulties—having an implanted identifier makes great sense,” says John Halamka, a former emergency physician and now CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. “Others can just carry a card in their wallet, a medic-alert bracelet, or a USB drive with their personal health records. There is no clear medical or business justification for chipping large populations of healthy people.”

In fact, so far there is no clear evidence that the VeriChip will help patients facing medical emergencies. The first study designed to determine whether patients, physicians, and insurers benefit at all from VeriChip began only last fall, in New Jersey.

Other nonimplanted technologies based on RFIDs may soon provide some of the benefits to the patient VeriChip hopes for. For instance, nonprofit health care informatics organization MedicAlert is researching RFID-enabled bracelets that would link to a personal health care record. However, as with VeriChip, a key question is how to ensure the privacy of the information in the databases, while at the same time providing easy access to the database by caregivers in emergency situations.

A right to privacy is at the heart of some of the questions raised by implanted RFID tags. In agreeing to be chipped for medical purposes, the patient gives up a measure of privacy for his or her own potential benefit. But when chipping is used for other reasons, difficult confidentiality issues can arise. When a business gives an identity card to a newly hired worker, for example, the company retains ownership of the card. But will the employer also own the chip inside an employee’s body?

A test case may be on the horizon: the first U.S. company to implant employees with VeriChip, CityWatcher.com, in Cincinnati, recently closed its doors. Its CEO, Sean Darks, himself an implantee, did not return repeated phone calls inquiring whether employees kept their implants after the company folded. VeriChip itself makes no recommendation about whether former employees should be “dechipped,” says the company’s Bolton. But he says removal is a quick and easy procedure. “I’ve had many [chips] in and out of my body,” he says.