A pair of news articles about RFID piqued my interest the other day: the California State Aseembly has passed a bill that forbids employers from requiring mandatory RFID implants in employees. Now it’s up to Ahh-nold to sign it into law.

Meanwhile, VeriChip, the company which has developed these implantable devices, announced a program with an Alzheimer’s Disease patient care organization in Florida to tag 200 Alzheimer’s patients with RFID implants containing their medical records and personal identification data.

It’s interesting to see where we are drawing the line between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable use of this technology with regard to humans. It’s a privacy issue for employees who don’t want their employers tracking their whereabouts, but apparently one loses that right to privacy when one is afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. The argument can be made that because Alzheimer’s patients often get lost or disoriented, the safety concerns outweigh the privacy issues, but its important to pay very close attention to where the line blurs. There are already programs to offer RFID tagging for children by embedding the tags in clothing, backpacks, and special locator devices, and it’s a very short path from putting tags on kids’ clothes to putting the tags right in the kids themselves, especially considering our over-the-top paranoia about child safety. Making it acceptable to implant RFID chips in adults who aren’t quite competent anymore is the thin edge of the wedge for making it more acceptable to tag kids.

For now, it’s good to see a state like California take a proactive stance toward preventing another vector for engineering social acceptability. That should help other progressive states move in the same direction.