The Future Present of Workplace Monitoring

The students will remember last week in class when I gave them a "pop" quiz (more in the spirit of drawing interest by providing some trivia and shock value than a quiz of their knowledge) on workplace surveillance and monitoring that I included the following question:

Which of the uses of GPS monitoring is most common currently?
a) Tracking employees’ cell phone
b) Tracking company vehicles
c) Tracking employees’ IDs/Smartcards
d) Tracking chips implanted under the skin of employees

At the time, I intended option "d" to be a bit of a joke.

Well, leave it to the Internet age to make my futuristic joke a thing of present reality. This morning I read the following at Security Focus:

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.

Hat tip to the excellent Workplace Prof Blog.