Wouldn’t the body reject them, and/or get infected around the implant area?
We already implant subdermal RFID chips in animals and people. You just put the chip inside a non-biologically reactive substance and it’s fine.
The bigger problem is scanning distance. You’re limited to only a dozen meters or so if you’re not using an active RFID with battery. ~100 meters with a battery but then you have to change the battery every now and then.
I’ve had a toll pass device for 10 years. It gets scanned at 80mph or more and hasn’t needed a new battery yet. The newest models are the size of a credit card.
Yeah but radio doesn’t like meat shields being in the way. The frequencies normally used in RFID only penetrate a few cm into people.
I guess we could always advocate for RFID tattoos if we really wanted to get this going.
They’re also probably broadcasting at powers not safe for humans to constantly be around, only for the 1/10th of a second you pass under.
Yeah, it goes through just about any material. I used to keep one under my seat on my motorcycle. So it would scan through me, the rubber/foam/whatever seat and into the metal box under my ass. That was 10+ years ago in the Orlando area, I can’t imagine they have gotten less accurate
I just got one that’s literally a sticker stuck to the inside of my windshield
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With present tech, I don’t think so unless the area where you’re being tracked is full of equipment that can read the tags (think big RFID readers like you see on the exits of stores). Unless the tracker implant is fairly large to be able to contain/harvest power to power their own active transmitter. Then it would probably be noticeable or at least uncomfortable.
I’m basing this on the fact that we chip pets with passive tags, and those don’t seem to suffer any kind of rejection/infection.
The pet chips are nice. Our cat flap detects it and only opens for our cat.
Oh, that’s handy.
How many 5g towers are there?
4G can track you to a few meters accuracy easily. Probably even better if you’re in a city. If cell response timings don’t give away your location, there’s a mechanism in your phone intended for emergency services that will have your phone turn on GPS and send back your current position automatically, initiated from over the network. Best to assume your carrier knows exactly where your phone is (as well as your car, as modern cars come with cellular modems as well).
mmWave 5G will give away your exact location all of the time. Exact as in down to the centimeter or less. The intent for 5G is to put a small transmitter on every street light so everyone gets gigabit internet everywhere.
This all works because these are active protocols. Passive protocols like RFID won’t be very useful for tracking people. It’s why airtags use Bluetooth and UWB for detection rather than RFID.
The tower is where you can put an rfid scanner. There’s lots of them, they support power and network, and they aren’t obvious.
They have to be pretty obvious because they need to have a directed beam running at something like 12W per direction to get more than a few meters of range, and that assumes you have a massive antenna (credit card shaped at the very least) in visual range. In theory you could use beamforming to hide the antenna better but you’d be sucking in and continously transmitting a lot of power just to scan tags on cars.
It doesn’t make sense anyway. Everyone carrying at least one 4G capable device with them at all times these days. It they’re not, they probably have a mandatory cell phone/WiFi beacon/Bluetooth beacon of some sort embedded in their cars. The government can track everyone’s moves exactly if they wanted to, from kilometers away. Why waste kilowatts per street on RFID scanners when people give their location away for free anyway?
If these tags worked well enough for location tracking, I would’ve expected a lot more presence detection hardware for smart homes to use them.
Depends, what do you define as 5g? There’s multiple 5g frequencies.
There’s 5g that’s basically just 4g with some extra toppings (low band). I don’t really consider this 5g just because there isn’t any appreciable difference to the end user.
There’s the mid band which gets pretty good range, and much better speeds.
Then there’s the mmWave (high) bands which are VERY short range, but insane speeds.
https://www.rfwel.com/us/index.php/5g-nr-frequency-bands
But in cities basically all towers have been upgraded from 4g to the low band 5g. I almost never see my phone connected to good old 4g unless I’m way out in the middle of nowhere. (USA)
OP is asking if it’s possible to track someone.
I’m suggesting that passive rfid is possible with transmitters, and there are 5g towers in lots of places, enough to track a person if a government was inclined. I see them every block in many city business centers.
Aa key trait of RFID is that it’s passive and only has a range of inches to maybe 5 feet. Even mmWave towers are typically out of that range, plus it needs active power. Tracking someone using their (actively powered) phones cell signal is incredibly easy, even with 4g. It’s shifting through all the data that’s hard and time consuming.
Identifying someone using 5g’s radio frequencies would technically quality as Radio Frequency IDentification. When people talk about RFID they’re typically referring to those passively powered key cards. Those key cards barely work when they’re an inch away from the object, let alone 5 feet away plus 0.5 cm of RF absorbing skin.
As I stated previously, toll booth rfid work at 20+feet and 80+.
UHF RFID and the passive RFID injected into people’s skin are quite different technology. The credit card sized antenna combined with a directed radio signal (and a license plate scanner for backup) can do several meters, but a tag in your body won’t be readable beyond a few centimeters. Unless you use an active radio, of course, but then you need to power that radio somehow.
Implants that don’t get rejected exist. Either medical or as body art or even by cyber enthusiasts. I’d say even a piercing would qualify as a type of implant. So I guess if you know what you’re doing you can get around the infection topic.
Forget that, what powers them? Something that can be read with a close by scanner makes some since since I figure you could induce a current in one, but the kind you sometimes see in movies that constantly sends out a signal that some satellite can clearly track anywhere in the world, and do so for days, weeks, months or longer, would need one heck of a battery I’d imagine? And in a very small space too
Bring back RTGs! They’ve already proven their use in pacemakers.
Pacemakers have batteries and modern ones broadcast a lot of telemetry, and last up to a decade. Not sure how much more power would be needed to broadcast to a satellite or cell tower though.
Subdermal is a lot easier than implanting in other compartments, e.g., intracranial. For example, hormonal birth control exists as an implant.
But, there’s fascinating research into how the brain rejects implanted electrodes, e.g., neuralink. Lots of work has been done developing materials that are less likely to be rejected by the brain and the brain’s immune system. For example, electrodes can be coated in chemicals to make them less harsh to the body, and flexible materials can be used.
We also have subcutaneous birth control that doesn’t get rejected.
artificial organs, that birth control rods in the arm, I have a hernia mesh in me right now and I did not have to take immune surpressors and neither did my wife with an artificial hip (which did get infected) and screws in the knee oh and a plate in her skull. screwing artifical teeth into jaws is very common now to. Seems like a little subdermal implant would be no were near as bad as these common practices.
Many materials are biologically inert. Titanium, for example, is often used for replacement joints and doesn’t need anti-rejection drugs. They autoclave or otherwise sterilise things during the operation, so the infection risk is pretty much the same as for any other kind of operation.
I think this is asking if something seen in movies could happen in real life, but I first read it as getting something implanted when going to see a movie and couldn’t figure out why no one was asking why you would do this.
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Yes
