Ohio Employer Implants Employee Microchip

Cincinnati firm CityWatcher.com, a provider of video surveillance, monitoring, and video storage for government and business, has become the first in the nation to implant microchips under employees' skin as part of its overall security system.

At this time, only three CityWatcher.com employees, including CEO and founder Sean Darks, have the chips embedded under the skin of their forearms, which they swipe across a reader in order to gain access to the company's data center.

Darks says he wouldn't ask one of his employees to do something he wouldn't do himself. "None of my employees are forced to get the chip to keep their job," Darks says in an interview with CNN.

The chips, about the size of a grain of rice, don't enable CityWatcher.com to track employees' movements. "It's a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever," Darks told CNN. "It's the same thing as a keycard."

Darks's firm provides surveillance cameras and Internet monitoring for high-crime areas in a number of cities. CityWatcher is experimenting with the chips to control employee access to areas in which data and images are stored for use by city police departments.

"Because CityWatcher.com is a provider of video solutions for government and business, we wanted to not only improve security for highly secure areas, but wanted do so with the next generation of product that would integrate with our existing system," Darks says.