Powder chips in your hair
Chips are becoming so microscopic that they can be sprinkled over people like a cloud of dust. Many fear that the emergence of this 'horror chip' means the end of privacy once and for all. Powder chips are only 0.05 millimetres long and wide. To give you an idea: that's the size of a grain of sand.
Japanese company Hitachi has achieved this. This is a major achievement: the powdered chips are as much as 64 times smaller than the smallest RFID chips that have existed so far. That tiny size has all sorts of practical advantages and new applications beckon. Such powder chips could, for example, be incorporated into banknotes and concert tickets to deter counterfeiting. Expensive jewellery - even the most sophisticated - could have a chip embedded in it, making it always identifiable. This makes theft a lot more unattractive.
Sounds good, but much more can be done. Powder chips could, in theory, be sprinkled over a crowd of people, for example. Police could do that to a crowd of rioting football supporters. Those supporters who are not picked up on the spot could be found later when they walk through a detection gate at the metro, for example.
Source: AD, Ferry Piekart, Friday 11 April 2008