Aslong as it's short range and the data is not rewritable there is very little danger to it. I actually think it's ideal for many things. Take for example people with food allergies. You have a little palm reader that you take to the supermarket and instead of having to read each and every individual (illegable) specification of whats in a product you just hold the product to the scanner and based on your allergies the palm reader determines if you can eat this product safely or not. As bonus it might actually give you some meal suggestions while you're at it.

Other applications would be automatic check-out at your local supermarket, digital patient id + for example a photo on their wrist etc etc.

Aslong as you cannot rewrite the data on the chips remotely and the range of access is very short most of the conspiracy theories and big brother schemes can't work effectively.


(Edited by Chambler 17/07/2006 14:03)

I was also thinking "scary" in the sense that we can actually build stuff like that now, makes me think "Woah, that's cool" - you've got to admit, it is pretty cool, no?

Thought you went on a paranoia streak again Pretty cool we can build these things though, would be even cooler if we can actually start doing "neat" and innovative stuff with them. I'm still waiting for the killer application to be honest as these chips are expensive to make. Where a bar-code costs 0.3p to print on a product embedding these things is a factor 100-10000 more expensive (based on the cost of modern rfid chips). This is a pretty big price difference that we end consumers will eventually have to pay.

---

taken from the article
All the components to make the chip, including modem, antenna, microprocessor and memory, can be fabricated as a single unit helping to keep unit costs low. HP speculated that once in production the devices could cost as little as one dollar each.

---