Spychips
Encyclopedia
Spychips is a term privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

 advocates use to refer to radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchip
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

s because it conveys what they see as the potential downsides of the technology.

Origin

The term was first coined as "spy chips" by privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht
Katherine Albrecht
Katherine Albrecht, EdD is the founder of CASPIAN , a national consumer organization created in 1999 to educate consumer-citizens about shopper surveillance. She is a consumer privacy advocate and anti-RFID spokesperson...

, founder of CASPIAN
CASPIAN
Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering is a USA grass-roots consumer group dedicated to fighting supermarket "loyalty" or frequent shopper cards. CASPIAN's efforts are directed at educating consumers, condemning marketing strategies that invade shoppers' privacy, and...

 (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 with RFID." 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 corporation
Multinational corporation
A multi national corporation or enterprise , is a corporation or an enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country. It can also be referred to as an international corporation...

s like Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...

, Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....

, and even government agencies
Government agency
A government or state agency is a permanent or semi-permanent organization in the machinery of government that is responsible for the oversight and administration of specific functions, such as an intelligence agency. There is a notable variety of agency types...

 like the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Postal Service
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...

.

Implantable spychips

The opponents of RFID have raised concern over a human-implantable chip called the "VeriChip
VeriChip
VeriChip was the only Food and Drug Administration -approved human-implantable radio-frequency identification microchip. It was marketed by PositiveID, a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions, and it received United States FDA approval in 2004. Its manufacture and marketing were discontinued in...

" created by Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., and its proposed use for financial transactions, leading to a "cashless" monetary system. Some fundamentalist Christians
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

 have also opposed RFID "spychips", citing biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 warnings of the "Number of the Beast
Number of the Beast
The Number of the Beast is a term in the Book of Revelation, of the New Testament, that is associated with the first Beast of Revelation chapter 13, the Beast of the sea. In most manuscripts of the New Testament and in English translations of the Bible, the number of the Beast is...

" in the Book of Revelation
Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...

. Albrecht and McIntyre address these concerns in a follow-up book titled "The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance."

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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