LoJack for Humans.

Not quite the same, IMHO. This is more of a in-built security, anti-crime and health monitoring device. Especially useful for the absent-minded, disabled, incapacitated, and parents and their children.

So, the CIA as decided to violate my constitutional rights, and can see I’m at home, at Target, or at a bar somewhere in Detroit. :shrug:

They can pretty much do this now, since I, and millions of others, have a smartphone as you say.

Except, unlike the smartphone, it has no private data on it, like emails, passwords, acct. numbers, address book with names and numbers and addresses, etc. that can truly be exploited by any nefarious peoples.

Right now, no.

But I could envision a point in time where such a chip might be used as a common form of biometric identification or commerce.

I go to a lot of industry lectures on “big data” and in spite of all the fears of government agencies or corporations tracking your every move, it doesn’t really work that way. Well, it does and it doesn’t. The trend these days is to add more sensors and more tracking to pretty much anything that can be sensed or tracked. All with the end goal of figuring out how to sell better, build better spaces for people to live and work in, create more efficient networks of information and transportation, all sort of stuff.

It could get to the point where not having a chip installed would be more of a pain in the ass than actually having it.

When I first read this, I thought this feature might be useful to the death panels under Obamacare. Broadcast the “kill-phrase” and take 'em out!!!

Wow, that reminds me that when I was a kid, my Mom once walked out of a store because they were asking for a digital signature and she felt her privacy was being violated. Now it seems like everybody’s business is public knowledge thanks to the miracle of technology, and most people in succeeding generations really don’t care.

OMG! Y2K!

It’s a brave new world, for sure. Besides, most banks and credit institutions are insured against fraud, and identity theft.

It’d scare the hell out of this generation, mostly, because they’ll start facebooking rumors about hackers locating healthy victims, and next thing they know, they wake up in bath of ice, less a kidney or two.