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Who gets tagged?
From the earliest city states to today, the people in power have always wanted to be able to identify other people and animals and keep track of them.

Perhaps the most obvious way of doing this is to tag them. You attach something to them or mark them in some way so that you can always find out who they are even if they can't tell you or don't want to tell you.

Another way is to record something unique about them (like their fingerprint) that you can use to identify them. This is called biometrics. A similar way is to record their DNA so you can do a genetic test to find out their identity.

Tagging animals
Ever since people started keeping animals for food instead of just hunting them, they have needed to be able to keep track of the animals they own.

Keeping livestock animals is part of a system of food production. A system as important as that needs an information system to control it, even if that information system is very simple.

The easiest way to keep track of livestock has always been to mark the animal in some way.

Activity
Identify the participants, data or information and information technology for a veterinary surgery's database for the tagging of one type of animal.

Attaching a tag
One way of tagging an animal is to put an actual tag on it. Often people attach a marker to its ear. For hundreds of years people in Europe and Africa have tagged cows, sheep and goats by attaching a marker to the animal's ear.

The problems with these tags are:

• they can fall off
• they can be pulled out if the animal rubs against a tree
• someone can take the tag out and replace it with their own tag.

Altering appearances
One way around this problem has been to change something about the way the animal looks. For example clipping a piece of an animal's ear or another part of their body.

The most common way of changing the animal is to brand it by burning an identification mark into the animal's hide.

In more recent times people have wanted to identify and keep track of animals like pets, endangered species in the wild, and animals in zoos. In situations like these cutting or burning the animal's skin is not appropriate.

Electronic tagging
New technology allows animals to be tagged electronically. The technology used by the United States to tag Haitian and Cuban refugees in 1994 was originally designed for tagging pets.

Instead of attaching a plastic tag to an animal's ear, or branding it, a microchip can be put under the animal's skin. The microchip has a unique number that can be read by a scanner. You hold the scanner near the part of the animal that has the chip, and it tells you the number. That way you can identify exactly which animal it is.

The system was implemented to ensure that lost pets were returned to their owners. Your dog or cat or pet lizard may have a chip under its skin. The number is recorded in a central database. Anyone who finds a pet animal can take it to a vet or the RSPCA, and they can scan for the number and find out whose pet it is.

An AVID remote frequency identification (RF/ID) chip. Each one has its own unique ID number. Powerhouse Museum collection.

This fat syringe is used to put the chip under an animal's skin. It doesn't hurt though. Powerhouse Museum collection.

Activity
Identify the issues raised so far on tagging.

AVID technology is used to tag pets.

Tagging pets with microchips is now so common that the NSW Government has introduced regulations about how animals can be tagged.

Tagging other animals Once the technology had been developed to tag pets with microchips, people started using it to tag other kinds of animals. Now it is used to tag animals in all kinds of different situations, from laboratory rats to cattle.

The RFID device on the ear of a cow. Courtesy: Global Supermarket magazine.

The National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) has been developed by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) in collaboration with SAFEMEAT, a government and industry initiative with the assistance of the Australian cattle producers and processors. The system uses radio frequency identification (RFID) devices that are placed in the ear of the cattle or in the rumen of the animal with a bolus.

Reading the RFID device using a hand-held reader. Courtesy: Global Supermarket magazine.

RFID reader mounted on the cattle race. Courtesy: Global Supermarket magazine.

RFID reader mounted on the cattle race. Courtesy: Global Supermarket magazine.

Tagging is not the only way people use to identify and keep track of animals. Sometimes things about an animal's body can be recorded a bit like the way people can be fingerprinted. Click here to find out about animal biometrics.

Tagging people
In 1994 the United States used microchips to tag refugees. This was done to help process their applications for asylum in the USA.

But this is not the only reason why people have been tagged in the past. Over the centuries, people have tried to control other people, and they've always found a way to do it by tagging them.

Slavery has existed for thousands of years. Perhaps the best known example today is the kidnapping of people from Africa to be used as slaves. It became common to brand the slaves by burning a design onto their skin with hot metal.

Another example of the tagging of people was the tattooing of ID numbers onto the arms of concentration camp prisoners by the Nazis during World War II.

These tags become symbols of ownership and domination.

Other numbers
In our modern society there are many reasons for implementing information systems. All sorts of organisations use information systems to identify and keep track of their own staff or people they deal with outside the organisation. This includes:

• people with bank accounts have account numbers
• employees have employee numbers
• staff with security clearance have pin numbers
• drivers have drivers licence numbers
• everyone who works in Australia has a tax file number
• children have school ID numbers.

New information technology
New information technology gives us many ways to provide people with identification:

• photo ID cards
• smart cards
• bar codes
• biometrics, such as finger scanning or voice recognition
• implanted microchips
• global positioning transmitters.

Student ID cards
In some schools in America student ID cards have a bar code. In the USA everyone has a Social Security Number, even if they don't get government benefits. It operates as a national ID number for all citizens. Some schools have ID cards with a bar code recording the student's Social Security Number.

There have been objections to this, students have won battles to have the barcodes removed.

In America there has been talk of using pin numbers, electronic fingerprint scans, or even voice recognition, to allow kids to buy on their account at the school canteen. In some United States schools access to the actual school site is only permitted with an appropriate pin number of some other identification.

Bar coded data is used in the school's library system for borrowing books in many Australian schools.

Activity
Make an appointment with your school or local librarian to discuss the use of bar coding.

Implanting microchips
Some people complain that if this is taken to its logical conclusion, kids could end up implanted with a microchip, like the ones some people put in their pets. The kids could be scanned as they come and go from school, to keep track of who's in the building. See one vision of this possible future.

This technology is being developed as a counter measure for people who are likely kidnap targets. The microchip is hidden inside the person's body. Maybe even they don't know where in their body it is. Their location can always be tracked by satellite. The chip gets its power from energy generated by the person's own body. If they die, the chip will stop transmitting. The searchers will know the person is dead, even if they haven't found them yet.

This would be great for preventing kidnapping, however it may be used for other purposes.

African slaves
For hundreds of years European empires took men, women and children from Africa to be slaves. Most of the slaves spent the rest of their lives doing all the hard work in European colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean.

Sometimes Europeans got the slaves by kidnapping them from their villages. Most of the time they just bought them at slave markets from African or Arab slave traders.

The owners of slaves sought ways to protect their property. In 1440 the Portuguese started branding slaves by burning a mark on their skin to show who they belonged to.

After that, other Europeans like the Spanish, French, English and Dutch started branding their slaves. That became the normal way slave owners controlled information about their African slaves. Some even branded their slaves with a cross once they had baptised them as Christians.

Some of the refugees who were tagged at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 1994 would have been descendants of Africans who were branded and taken to Haiti and Cuba as slaves.

The branding of slaves was a way of integrating them into an information system, but it was quite a primitive information system. The brand just showed who they belonged to, not their individual identity in that system.

Click here to read more about the branding of African slaves.

Nazis
In World War II Germany conquered many nearby countries. At its peak, the Nazis controlled most of Europe. This gave them absolute power over the lives of many millions of people. Their plans included a scheme to get rid of groups they thought were racially inferior to them.

It is worth noting that the Germans took advantage of census data to identify people who were from a Jewish or gypsy background. This abuse of confidential data is why many people raise concerns about the collection and storage of personal information.

The Nazis also saw people they conquered as an economic resource or free labour. Some people, like Poles and Russians, were to be slave races, who would live only so they could work for the German economy.

The Nazis wanted to treat their slave labour like a resource and not like people, so they didn't use their names to identify them. Instead they gave them ID numbers which were tattooed onto their arm.

Everything that made them look like individual people was taken away and replaced with a visible number. This symbolically turned them from people into material.