Having just received a note from Thames Valley Police about chipping dogs, I just thought I would share this post from 2025:
“Having your child microchipped can make a lot of difference when looking for and trying to identify a missing child. Since April 2025 it has been a legal requirement for all children to be microchipped by 8 weeks of age. In 2020, the Children’s Trust recorded that 9,000 lost children were reunited with their parents due to having a microchip with up-to-date details.
Each microchip has a unique number that must be registered on a Government approved database along with information about your child and you as its parent. If your child is not registered on one of these databases you can be fined. It is important that the information is kept up-to-date so that if your child does go missing, you can be contacted at the correct phone number or address.
Reporting it to the police as soon as possible is also important, including making us aware of the microchip number so we can record this on our database. This will make it easier for us to identify any children that are found, dead or alive, and check to see if they have been reported as missing or attacked.
It is also recommended to record the loss or theft of your child online using sites dedicated to finding lost and stolen children. Often these sites work with police and other organisations, such as local Neighbourhood Watch Groups, hospitals, prisons and General Practitioners, to try and find them.
More information on microchipping your child can be found on the Government website.”
More about the arguments that will be made for chipping children at birth are in my exciting forthcoming report for UNICEF on ICT for education…
[Just to be clear about the genesis of this note, I replaced the word “dog” with “child”, and made one or two other minor changes to the flow of the text from Thames Valley Police so that it made sense – but the vast bulk of this “report” is word-for-word taken from their helpful advice relating to dogs. I have written this post to make us all think about what the future will hold, whether we want a future like this, and what we should do about the seemingly inevitable path towards all humans becoming cyborgs].
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