Luckily I've seen no evidence to support that claim other than the word of a man trying to sell microchipping services.

If anything it's the people around me in their 40s and 50s who are most cavalier about constantly sharing their location and activities with the world ala Facebook checkins.

It’s rampant in the young as well, but they’re just doing it in circles you aren’t a part of, on apps you don’t use or haven’t heard of.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing but entertaining the salesman's claim. Although I could see his claim being true for certain parts of the service industry, overall I doubt that he's telling the truth.

There's also a huge problem with the article's followup question about GPS. It shows the author has no idea what he's talking about.

These chips are just passive RFID. This actually has been shown to be incredibly insecure; these chips have so little compute (necessarily), that all they can really do is broadcast a number. Walk by someone with a reader, and now you have everything you need to compromise security.

Given that you have to keep the implant super small to be easily injectable, how the hell could you put a GPS on that? You'd need not only the hardware for the GPS, but also a power supply of some kind. GPS is one of the most draining features on your phone. RFID and bluetooth are still the main technologies for consumer asset tracking because they're such a lower power drain.

This article is FUD. I would have a problem having an implant put in too, but it contains no more functionality than an employer issued badge. It's basically just a badge you can't put down. Now, that inserts all sorts of issues, yes, but it's not same as having a GPS or something that I can't put down. My phone is far, far more alarming from a privacy perspective than these are.

They didn't say the GPS was in the implant.

>The company has just launched a mobile phone app that pairs the chip with the phone’s GPS, enabling the implantee’s location to be tracked.

The phone app reads the RFID to ensure that the person is at the same location as the phone.

Look at the whole paragraph -

"The company has just launched a mobile phone app that pairs the chip with the phone’s GPS, enabling the implantee’s location to be tracked (...) Could he ever see the company using GPS to track its chipped employees? “No,” he says. “There’s no reason to.”

Maybe the CEO just meant -he- wouldn't ever use that, but to my mind the question makes more sense as asking "Hey, do you plan on putting a GPS on the chip" rather than "Hey, do you plan on actually using this functionality you just built out". But I may just be misunderstanding. That said, the level of technical knowledge of mainstream reporting has...generally not been the best.

I'm an old millennial (or young gen X, depending on who you ask), but I can't see anyone thinking it's "cool" to have a tracking chip implanted like a dog.

It's not cool that it's a tracking chip. It's cool that you can pay for your snacks and open doors without pulling a card out of your pocket.

Depending on how invasive it is, I wouldn't mind it just for the novelty of the whole thing.

They could do that with a fingerprint reader if that were the point. In that case you would get a choice in whether it were read or not, instead of it being read automatically whenever you're nearby.

I wouldn't even want my fingerprint to be in any of these systems...

Facial recognition is the answer here for practical reasons.

I've never met anyone that's part of my generation that thinks being chipped is cool. I would argue that older generations are often more likely to "drink the kool-aid" when it comes to corporate policy.

What I see as troubling is the photo of the guy doing the chipping is a big bearded dude with tattoos. I also bet he was very smooth talker and was telling silly jokes and making people laugh. I would even go as far as saying this is done purposefully to give the procedure an edgy feel to lure young people. I wonder what the turnout would have been if an "average joe" came in to do the chipping.

I suspect that tattoo/piercing artists are simply an affordable set of professionals with the right experience for implanting various body mods.

Good point and that occured after the post but still, adds that edgy flare needed to sell it.

Born in 91. I would never do this.

It's the same thing as social media 'influencers' FOMO, envy and greed is what fuels the millennials. Too bad it's also their biggest cause of unhappiness...

What are you even talking about?