Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2002/06/11/people_chipping_company_hit_by/

People chipping company hit by class actions, FDA probe

Digital nightmare?

By John Lettice

Posted in Personal Tech, 11th June 2002 13:42 GMT

The pseudo-cyborging activities of Applied Digital Solutions and Digital Angel have run into serious trouble in the shape of a comprehensive axing by WorldNetDaily, which publishes a special report on the subject today.

Among the woes the site lists are a US Food and Drug Administration investigation, at least four class action lawsuits by stockholders, problems with its contract with the California Department of Corrections, and several instances of what one might term overly-optimistic claims by ADS as to the existence of products and the substance of claimed deals with various government agencies, hospitals and the like.

VeriChip, the latest of the company's products, is being pitched as not requiring FDA approval. It appears to be simply an injectable personal identifier, pretty much like the ones you put into pets, and naturally various pieces of personal information can be associated with that identifier. However, when the Jacobs family was chipped by ADS last month, a scanner run over the chips revealed personal medical details. WorldNetDaily quotes Wally Pellerite, assistant to the director of the FDA Office of Compliance, as saying that ADS didn't need FDA approval so long as the chips didn't contain medical information and didn't link to any kind of medical database. Which does make it kind of tricky to figure out where that medical information could have come from. We are told that the way it's supposed to work is that the scanner reads the ID, then contacts the database in order to get the data, but that really does sound like a link anyway, hence the FDA investigation.

WorldNetDaily seems to have been making a special subject of ADS and Digital Angel for a few years now, so you're much better off reading about it there. Links to numerous previous articles are at the bottom. ®