A different kind of electronic tattoo.
An RFID tattoo is the same thing as sticking in a chip (with fewer capabilities due to the extremely passive nature of the technology) in something (or someone) but with a visual attached, be it functional or aesthetic.
Somark Innovations, a small company working out of Saint Louis, has successfully tested an RFID tattoo, on cows, mice and rats: enabling an identifying number embedded under the skin to be read from over a meter away.
Implanting identification numbers into animals is nothing new: in the UK pets travelling abroad, and returning, must have an identification chip inside them, but these are expensive and relatively large (12mm by 2mm in diameter), and the readers have a very restricted range.
The system developed by Somark uses an array of needles to quickly inject a pattern of dots into each animal, with the pattern changing for each injection. This pattern can then be read from over a meter away using a proprietary reader operating at high frequency.
The ominous part is that the company considers the military to be a “secondary market”. Will they turn off the tattoo when soldiers leave the service? Will they start tattooing criminals with permanent ID codes, like in the movies? Where will they use this technology besides cattle and soldiers?
This would only work, IF, you couldnt REAd the dots.
I’d imagine the tatoo could be turned off by tatoing over it and shorting it out.
Hmm… I bet the next group to adop that would be the BDSM folk.
I suspect that under intense irradiation on any wavelength the tattoo would amplify, such an RFID tag would either a) self destruct relatively harmlessly or b) burn at high temperature, resulting in a large burned region, resembling a very large boil. Indeed, if the victim didn’t turn the limb upside down to dump the ink off, it might burn right through. If the someone has cried out “Damn tink is in any way metalic, then B is most likely, I’m afraid.
Isn’t that lovely?