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Benefits April 11, 2006
Ohio Security Firm Uses Microchips Embedded in Employees
April 11, 2006 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - A Cincinnati
video surveillance firm has implanted microchips under
employees' skin as part of its overall corporate security
program.
Reported by Fred Schneyer
A news report on HR.BLR.com said CityWatcher.com, has taken the step with three employees including CEO and founder Sean Darks. The employees swipe the embedded chips across a special reader to gain access to the company’s data center, the report said.
The chips, about the size of a grain of rice, do not enable CityWatcher.com to track employees’ movements. “It’s a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever,” Darks told one interviewer. “It’s the same thing as a keycard.”
Darks’s firm provides surveillance cameras and Internet monitoring for high-crime areas in a number of cities. CityWatcher is experimenting with the chips to control employee access to areas in which data and images are stored for use by city police departments, the report said.
“Because CityWatcher.com is a provider of video solutions for government and business, we wanted to not only improve security for highly secure areas, but wanted do so with the next generation of product that would integrate with our existing system,” Darks explained in the report.
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