You won’t ever lose it, and you’ll always have it with you, but the newest way to carry an ID might turn a few stomachs.

That’s because it’s a tiny computer chip inserted under your skin.

It’s not science fiction either.  The chips, each smaller than your fingertip, have been approved by the government and are marketed for high-risk medical patients like people with Alzheimer’s who might not be able to tell doctors what is wrong with them.

But that’s not all.

The chips are being put in some bank and credit cards.  Starting last year, the U.S. government began putting them in passports.  And in some cases, the tiny little transmitters are being put in people. 

“These things are everywhere,” University of Houston professor Dennis Adams said.

The chips are called RFID, short for Radio Frequency Identification.

“This is the first business school that has an RFID lab,” Adams said.

He and his students have been trying to find new uses for the tiny chips.  RFID chips hold information that can be transmitted and read when they come up near a receiver.

“The chips can contain just a number or it can contain hundreds of bytes worth of data, including your medical records,” Adams said.

The technology has been used in student ID tags in Spring ISD to track when kids get on and off buses. 

Naturally, it all raises a lot of questions.

“Maybe the school system will see the advantages, but let’s suppose you’re a pedophile and get a reader so you can go into stores and you track where the children are,” University of St. Thomas business ethics professor Daryl Koehn said.

Koehn has an RFID transmitter in her car – it’s in her EZ Pass tag.

But she doesn’t consider it an invasion of her privacy, because she voluntarily put it there and accepts that she can now be tracked on the freeway. 

But having it in her passport isn’t the same.

“I would feel I might be more at risk of being kidnapped or targeted under those circumstances,” she said.

“I think once the security issues are worked out, it could be very valuable,” Dr. Susan Rountree at the Baylor College of Medicine said.

At the Med Center, Dr. Rountree says she’d only recommend the chips for her Alzheimer patients if the information could be reliably encrypted to prevent identity theft.

Fear of having data stolen by hackers is becoming a growth industry.

Web sites selling special wallets and passport holders that supposedly are impenetrable to hackers who could pass with receivers to read your personal data abound.

“We need to be able to encrypt the data so we feel safe about using the technology. Otherwise, its’ going to be a technology that’s a little scary,” Adams said.

While the microchips have been implanted in employees at the Mexican federal prosecutor’s office, few if any companies in the U.S. have been known to use them as of yet.

In fact, California, Wisconsin and North Dakota have taken steps to ban them as a job requirement.