A little story from a big city hospital:
“When you work on the east side of our hospital, psychiatric patients are a dime a dozen,” he said.
But this patient is different. She’s put together. She’s lucid. She’s got an incision.
A group crowded around the computer to see her x-ray.
“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” he said. “But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”
It turns out this 20-something woman was being pimped out by her boyfriend, forced to sell herself for sex and hand him the money.
Yeah, some days, you start to see the virtues of extinction.
Yup – sometimes it’s hard to see what progress we’re making :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-grooming-gang-sentenced-to-combined-103-years-in-prison-for-rape-and-sex-abuse-of-girls-a6897731.html
What’s sick is that it was just an RFID tag, like the kind you give to a dog. If your dog is lost and it goes to the shelter, they run a scanner over its skin and if there’s a chip they get a serial number that links to your contact info.
This thing obviously has zero utility for a human trafficker, and they certainly couldn’t “GPS track” someone with such a thing, it was just something they told her in order to torture and intimidate her. It was just a prop in a psychological game.
Yeesh. At first I did not believe that there was a ‘tracker’ that small, but as said its an RFID tag. So I guess the ‘b.f.’ could receive a ping from it when she entered and left where she was staying.
marcoli: They don’t work like that, the scanner has to be almost touching to read it. It’s purely a psychological torture, which if anything is even worse.
Ugh. Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me.
My cats have those. It’s tricky to get a reading, you have to know where the chip is. So yeah, purely a torture device.
What I see here though is progress: there’s always been trafficking, but more and more segments of society are finding it unacceptable to play along.
I’ve often wondered, (when in a sinister mood), why these tags are not routinely embedded in children. When abducted children are recovered, it would make finding their parents much quicker.
With all the experience of putting them in pets, wouldn’t that qualify for last phase of clinical trials of safety?
I know (see “sinister” above) that it is far better to eradicate the abduction problem, but why not as a safety last resort? Like seatbelts even as driving gets better.
I’ve often wondered, (when in a sinister mood), why these tags are not routinely embedded in children.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to tattoo QR codes on everyone?
Yeah, pretty useless as a tracker. RFID mainly makes sense for … inventory … control …
Crap. How many girls is this douchenozzle pimping out?
You can get active transmitters that size- they are used to track small mammals or birds for example. But the range is fairly limited and they have batteries with limited life- from about a day to about six months, depending on how often you set them to transmit. The passive ones, RFID type, need no batteries and last indefinitely but need to be close to the reader which supplies the power. As people said above, it’s the psychological effect that counts, the victim doesn’t know these limitations.
Aren’t there now shoes equipped with transmitters that are being marketed for Alzheimer’s patients?
Some days?
magistramarla – there are non-removable bracelets (that can be put on either a wrist or ankle). Some areas have them at the county sheriff’s office. There are regulations about proving the person has Alzheimer’s before being issued one.
re @13:
aren’t they also used for “house arrest”? errr some sort of highly regulated probation where one’s range of motion is precisely defined and if one walks out of it, the police are automatically dispatched? I see where using them to track Alzheimer’s to keep them from getting lost would be a beneficial use of the device.
For those of you done with humanity today, have a look at the battle happening on Amazon over reviews for the book of merman (or whatever it’s called).
I know it’s immature trolling, but its funny too.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592975003?keywords=book%20of%20mormon&qid=1457089595&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1
@7 slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
I’ve tagged my children before by placing bluetooth trackers (XY FindIt- meant for finding your wallet or keys) on charm necklaces. The KeepNear feature which notifies you if they get out of a certain range is very useful in crowds; we used ours at a major theme park to make sure they didn’t somehow wander off while we were distracted. They’re pretty young kids (3 and 5) so they stuck by us anyway, but it certainly made me feel better.