The legal ramifications of microchipping people in the United States of America - a state legislative comparison

The ability to microchip people for unique positive identification, and for tracking and monitoring applications is becoming increasingly scrutinized by the legal profession, civil libertarians, politicians in positions of power, human rights advocates, and last but not least, citizens across jurisdictions. The United States is among the few nations internationally, that have moved to enact state-level legislation, regarding the microchipping of people in a variety of contexts. This paper provides an overview of nine state laws/bills in the United States of America that have either enacted anti-chipping legislation or have recently proposed bills regarding the enforced chipping of persons. The aim of the paper is to highlight excerpts of legislation, to identify relevant stakeholders the legislation is directed toward and to briefly describe how it may affect their chipping practices. As a final outcome, the paper seeks to broadly compare state legislation, identifying differences in penalties and fines, and to show the complexity of this kind of approach to protecting the rights of citizens against unscrupulous uses of advanced information technologies.