The reason is:<\/p>\n
![\"iphone-02\"](\"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/iphone-02.jpg\")
\nEeevil corporations and governments don’t need to sneak chips under our skin or into our food packages or our clothing because we’ve all (or nearly all) gone out and bought and paid for our very own universal tracking devices because we find them convenient<\/i>. And cool. And fun.<\/p>\n
And they do even more<\/i> for Big and Little Brother than any sneaky old spychip ever could.<\/p>\n
At the donor’s request, I was going to write a piece on this. But once I finally got a chance to crank up StartPage, at the very top of the search results I found exactly the article I would have written, though mine might have been more Attitudinal and this one’s stronger on the informational:<\/p>\n
“How the fall of RFID chips explains our current surveillance state”<\/a> by Gillian Branstetter. Published less than three months ago.<\/p>\n Everything she writes about what these developments imply about mass acceptance of the surveillance society — nearly<\/i> everything — is the sad, damnable, spot-on truth. There’s about one paragraph I disagree with. I’ll leave you to read, ponder, and speculate for yourselves and I’ll try to join in on comments later.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n ADDED: In comments, Laird correctly notes that the chips in our credit cards are EMV chips. EMV stands for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa. These chips are not the true RFID chips we spent all that time dreading. Some chipped cards are capable of near-field communications (NFC) — which are indeed radio-frequency communications, but effective only at extremely short distances. Here’s more information<\/a> <\/p>\n But really, you’d best just read the comments below by some of the guys more in the know. Fact is, I picked a poor example when I mentioned the chipped cards and by doing that I ended up distracting from the main point of the article. Mea culpa.<\/i> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Updated 8\/8 to clarify a point about the nature of chips in credit cards. A funny thing happened on the way to RFID chips, long about 2009. All of a sudden, everybody stopped writing about them. Tech journals slowed their coverage. The mainstream media dropped the whole subject. And out here on the fringes, people quit writing new works predicting the disasters spychips would bring upon us. Now, that’s not to say that either RFID chips or the subject went away completely. On the contrary, there were articles and discussions on other topics that heavily involved RFID tech. For instance,…<\/p>\n