Hate arphids? Then you must hate babies, according to PC magazine columnist Lance Ulanoff.
Ulanoff made it clear this week to potential RFID advertisers that he is in their camp. In a short piece, he decries arfid opponents as “moaning about privacy and First Amendment implications” associated with the VeriChip subcutaneous arfid implant for humans.
Ulanoff says that America’s 4 million newborns each year should be chipped, so they can be tracked by Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. And he parrots VeriChip’s bogus argument that the chip will prevent tragic child abductions.
The truth is that hospitals are doing an excellent job preventing abductions without the use of permanent, implantable chips that have not undergone longterm testing in humans.
The American Academy of Pediatrics calls the risk of any newborn being abducted virtually nonexistent.
As a parent myself, I find it difficult to imagine another parent being a sucker for VeriChip’s “someone might steal your baby” pitch.
Ziff-Davis has a long history shilling for technology advertisers. For a time, the company was owned by the Japanese computer catalogue publisher Softbank.
And many years before that, in 1938, Ziff-Davis purchased the early science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which is credited with “inventing” flying saucers in its pages. William B. Ziff, Jr. inherited the company from his father in 1953. Many Ziff-Davis executives joked that Ziff, Jr., who abandoned his philosophical studies in Germany to run the company, “could see the future.”
I quite writing product reviews for several Ziff Davis publications a decade ago, after telling editors there that I refused to delete my criticisms of products from potential advertisers.
|