There Isn't A Microchip Under Your Skin Tracking You

I’ve written previously about subdermal implants. As a result, I receive the occasional concerning message from people thinking they’re being tracked or the likes. Small, discreet, implantable chips do not exist.

In media, you often see quick and easy injections. Take James Bond or The Hunger Games. Both are popular works which depict the protagonist being swiftly implanted with a chip deep into the forearm. Both are also pure works of fiction, with many outlandish concepts. Implants, as they and other media depict, are no more anchored in reality than the smart blood and nanobot viruses also seen in Bond or the fantastical prosthetics and mutant animals also seen in Panem.

Technology

When you see microchips, such as the ones placed in pets or the ones offered by companies like Dangerous Things, you’re seeing passive chips. They have no power source of their own and only operate when interacting with a close-range reader.¹ Microchips cannot remotely track you.

The first thing to consider is power. How do you power a tracking chip? A tiny little battery? Some sort of kinetically charged solution like you sometimes see in watches? Location tracking is notoriously power-intensive, so a small battery is sure to run out of charge swiftly. Implantable devices like pacemakers have large inbuilt batteries, and even Apple’s AirTags – which are also of considerable size, mind you – only have an expected battery life of one year.

Then, you must consider the complexities of broadcasting a signal. Even if you do somehow have power, how does the tracking get done and then sent to the malicious actor? You need an antenna of some description, which certainly takes up more space, and then must transmit/receive a signal through your flesh and then possibly your clothing and then possibly through a building, avoiding all forms of interference along the way. Humans are made mostly of water, and water blocks high-frequency radio waves incredibly well. Even just holding a dedicated GPS with a significant internal antenna incorrectly can hinder its accuracy, and location tracking within buildings is a notoriously tricky problem. Burying an antenna inside your body completely suffocates the signal.

Further, the more complex these supposed implants become, the larger they’re required to be. You can make some pretty tiny tech, but even the smallest powered trackers are still of decent size. If we hypothetically say that tech itself manages to be impossibly small, a coating is still required and needs to be of a reasonable thickness. Coatings are needed to prevent the implant itself from interacting with one’s own flesh, and they must be of a thickness such that they both provide a sufficient barrier and are impervious to expected impacts and forces. For microchip implants, glass or resin is usually used.

Tiny little chips (especially ones doing complex work like real-time tracking) also get really hot. Implants are also extremely visible in x-rays – even shining a bright light through your flesh will usually show them off. The idea of a small, working, discreet, tracking microchip is nothing more than science fiction.

Healing

Let’s suppose that some impossible chip becomes possible. Somehow, a tracking chip is made at the scale of currently available commercial NFC and RFID offerings. In such a case, it must still be implanted, which isn’t something that can be done discreetly. To implant something, an incision must be made. You need to make a hole in the skin and a pocket in the flesh so that an implant can be placed within it. You can’t just teleport an implant into somebody.

The larger the implant is, obviously, the larger the required pocket and opening must be. A safe placement must also be found. Microchip implants are always done rather shallow (which means you can usually visibly see and feel them). If you go too deep, they stop working. If you don’t go deep enough, your body forces them out. In general, it is an effort to stop your body pushing out an injection. Wounds heal in such a way that they zipper out anything stuck inside.

Your body doesn’t want to trap things inside your body, so trapping only happens in the case of material forced so deeply and with such a minimal entry hole that the wound heals before it can be pushed out, as sometimes seen with bullets. Even once a wound is healed, the body will still attempt to push foreign objects out. There are many cases of metal fragments working their way out of people decades later.

Healing takes multiple weeks. I covered the healing journey of my xG3 v2 bio-magnet. My hand swelled up, and I had to use medical strips to hold it in place – even then, my body pushed it out a bit towards the opening. My hand turned colours of yellow and green around the implant site, which it remained for multiple days, and it hadn’t healed back to normal until weeks afterwards. Even then, the entry point of the syringe was still not completely healed, and I’ll have a small but visible scar there for the rest of my life. All that was for my positively tiny xG3 v2, which is only 3mm by 15mm. Anything larger or deeper requires a scalpel incision and takes much longer to heal.

An implant is not installed casually or discreetly. Healing takes time, and implantation is an effort too. You need a sterile environment with a professional capable of an install. It isn’t happening subtly.

Viability

As we’ve established, the idea of an implanted tracker microchip is pure science fiction and falls apart in multiple places. However, let’s again suggest that by some marvel it is possible. Why would some super powerful entity choose microchips over any other less intrusive and more technically viable system?

You likely are being tracked everywhere you go, though not by a magical implanted tracker. There are more subtle methods, like cameras with facial detection and even gait recognition, your card payments at stores, your public transport usage, and the likes. Then there are your own devices. Your phone connecting to local towers or communicating with GPS systems and your car likely doing the same. Otherwise, social engineering. One has much less privacy than they think. You might share content which hints at your location. A single photo, even one which to the untrained eye seems innocuous, can be used to place you exactly.

For what reason would an adversary with technology beyond the bounds of known science spend such resources on a medically risky and complex, physically limited, and easily detectable surgical implant with healing periods when they can use open-source intelligence (OSINT) tactics for negligible cost? The infrastructure around us is already doing the work for free.

Recall Ockham’s razor: ‘When presented with competing theories, the simpler explanation is to be preferred’.

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If you think you’ve been microchipped against your will, that is incredibly unlikely. You should seek professional guidance from a registered medical expert. You can reference Dangerous Thing’s So you think you’ve been implanted against your will? for further reading. Do not message me if you’re having delusions about being microchipped or having your mind read.

Footnotes

1. You cannot just build a really large reader system to track people at long range any more than you can build a really large wireless charging system that charges things at long range. ↩