Edible RFID chips to track your every movement

Don't want an RFID implant? An edible spychip by any other name is on its way to you.

How can you avoid it if Kodak and the pharmaceuticals put RFID in pills?

RFID Gazette reports:

Hitachi recently came up with tiny "powder" RFID chips. Well tiny's fine, but what if you want to eat your chips? You're in luck. Kodak just filed a patent for edible RFID chips. They're designed for monitoring a patient's gastric tract and are covered in a harmless gelatin, which eventually dissolves.

What's more important than that they can be ingested is that these prove that RFID chips embedded deep in the body can be read by a scanner. But Kodak is also saying that pills could be manufactured with these chips inside them, so that doctors or nurses can confirm a patient took them.

And what if you're not a pill-taker - apart from Viagra, from none other than the esteemed Pfizer, which was recently fined a fortune for mis-selling its drugs?

Pfizer, maker of the infamous Viagra pill, is soon to ship its premier money makers with RFID tags to cut down on counterfeit production. Pfizer says the tag, which will be on the bottles, will contain a unique passport that can be checked as the product passes through each stage of the distribution chain. The assumption is, of course, that a counterfeit product will be unable to spoof such a passport. It appears that the Feds have already put this new process through the test with a pilot project that involved the likes of Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. and Wyeth working with over-the-counter shops like CVS and Rite Aid. The RFID chips will be in Viagra and other meds by end of next year. For more information, see the Associated Press article.

Update: FT: Novartis chip to help ensure bitter pills are swallowed