This Dog Is Smarter Than Most people Are About GPS

There are many indications that people have been watching too many stupid movies.  One almost sure way to find examples of less than intelligent behavior is to combine something scary, like kidnapping, with a popular technology like GPS that every magazine and newspaper writer (and apparently even some product designers/marketers think they know something about, when, in point of fact, they haven’t a clue.

Worried about increasing kidnapping rates, some affluent Mexicans have reportedly figured out a way to fight the crime.

They are embedding tiny, crystal-encased chips under their skin in hopes of making themselves easier to find after an abduction. Mexican security firm Xega, which has designed the system, says it is gaining popularity among users.

The chip, supposed to be no bigger than a grain of rice, is usually injected in the arm.

A transmitter in the chip communicates with a small GPS-enabled box that is carried by the client, says Xega. And it is the box that reports the GPS coordinates to the company when the panic button is pressed. It’s a bit similar to GPS-tracking systems currently being marketed to pet owners.

What’s not clear is how the embedded chip helps in the process or what will happen if the kidnappers throw the GPS box out…. amen on that, Priya Ganapati , see full article on alleged GPS implants) and congratulations for being a lot smarter than the average feature writer when the initials G, P and S show up in a headline

Almost of a certainty the implanted "grain of rice" chip is a passive RFI chip.  It can be scanned by an active (powered) RFI reader to determine the number or alpha-numeric code the chip was manufactured with.  It is not a GPS "chip" by any stretch of the imagination.

The part that I see that has some merit in this somewhat less than obvious system is that if the perpetrators rip the external, easy to spot GPS device off the victim,the device will immediately "know" it is separated from it’s ‘asset" and presumably sound an alarm.

Also, should the perpetrators have a devious mind like mine, a clever ploy would be to rip the GPS unit off the victim and attach it to some other person, animal, or even a vehicle going far away from where the victim is being held.  Anyone, for example watch Frantic?

The extra step of "keying" the tracking collar to the protective asset should be an important step in keeping the asset from becoming a victim, but please headline writers, it is not an "injectable, rice-sized GPS chip", ok?