Spychip is a term privacy advocates use to refer to radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips because it conveys what they see as the potential downsides of the technology.
[edit] Origin
The term was first coined as "spy chip" by privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering). Later, she and CASPIAN Communications Director Liz McIntyre coined it as one word and started the anti-RFID website www.spychips.com. They also wrote a book titled Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move. In this book they describe RFID as "... a technology that uses tiny computer chips—some smaller than a grain of sand—to track items at a distance.... We've nicknamed these tiny devices 'spychips' because of their surveillance potential".
Their book describes the world of RFID planned by multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and even government agencies like the United States Postal Service.
| Spychips are becoming more common in credit cards, passports, clothing, and elsewhere. |
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Clothes with spychips being scanned in a Bogart store, Norway
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Chinese train ticket with Finnish spychip
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[edit] Implantable spychips
Human-implantable spychip next to a grain of rice.
The opponents of RFID have raised concern over a human-implantable chip called the "VeriChip" created by Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., and its proposed use for financial transactions, leading to a cashless monetary system. Some fundamentalist Christians have also opposed RFID spychips, citing biblical warnings of the "Number of the Beast" in the Book of Revelation. Albrecht and McIntyre address these concerns in a follow-up book titled The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance.
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