If he has an open mind and is willing to come here and read, there is a ton of stuff about it. We even have a thread with people who think that stuff is real, and we let them know they need help.
I have heard this! I also didn’t give a shit and did it. I believe it is my body, I am able to do what I want with it. You have your body, so who am I to tell you that your implants/tattoo/(insert body mod, or have something inserted)is wrong? You do you.
Wait now, I hate marketdroids as much as the next guy. But “tracking” is used in any number of situations that doesn’t involve zeroing in on someone or something at any given moment: tracking number, tracking inventory label, tracking production card… Pet tracking chip isn’t misleading: it won’t tell you if Felix is sleeping on the neighbor’s window sill at 8:33, but it’ll tell you at which shelter or vet the chip was last scanned. The granularity is poor, but it’s still tracking.
Basically, the difference between tracking and locating.
I can track the shelters that the pet has been in, but I can’t locate it at this point in time if it’s moved from the last tracking point?
Just to play devils advocate 
If you live at home regardless of age and your parents are that against you having an implant, you can do it anyway but there is always the chance they could do something drastic like throw you out.
As it goes the same way, your 18 now no they can’t stop you but they also no longer have to provide you with alot of thing including shelter.
I don’t want to scare people off but it is ofcourse a possibility, I got my first around 17 and I did a self install at home my parents were not too happy but more because I didnt tell them before hand and I did it in my bedroom…
I think the word tracking in this context is very misleading for two reasons;
unlike a fedex package that has a planned route and you can “track” that package along it as it’s scanned at each point along that route, a lost pet will not be scanned at all until the finish line… at which point the owner is identified and called by the vet or animal shelter… the act of scanning the chip does not automatically kick off some kind of notification process for the owner, it’s purely an identification technology. Ultimately, there is no ongoing log of anything… nothing that would indicate a “trace” of any kind. Therefore, if you consider this to be a kind of “tracking”, then a collar with a nametag would also be considered a tracking device… but it’s not a tracking device… it’s an identifier only.
in the context of a lost pet scenario, the information being implicitly conveyed by calling it a “tracking chip” is that the pet can be located using the “tracking chip implant”. I’ve talked to so many people about the chips they put into their pets who falsely believe that if their pet is ever lost they can call… someone (nobody knows who to actually call)… and their pet can be found. The only people who seem to understand this is not actually possible are those who have lost a chipped pet before.
No, you can’t really. The shelter queries the chip ID against various databases and calls the owner. There is not even a log of the scan because that has nothing to do with the point of the whole system… to ID the owner and contact them.
The Scanner Angel folks have a database that the Halo Scanner syncs up with. It’s not ubiquitous, and vets / shelters have to download and install the app, and charge up their Halo Scanner with the computer on. So it’s hardly perfect or reliable, but it’s something.
I kind of assumed there was at least a national registry of lost pets in all developed countries that vets had to report found animal tags to. But perhaps not…
I’m pretty sure that’s a down-link only… meaning the database is pulled down to your local computer so you can match up IDs with current owners. it also logs your own scans, but I don’t think it uploads those scan events to a centralized database of any kind.
nope… there are various databases of chip ID to owner info only. in the EU there is an ISO 134khz standard for animal ID which is strictly followed for the chip side of things, which means various readers will be able to read all ISO standard animal chip IDs regardless of vendor, so maybe there is some consolidation of data there too… but in the US there is no standard, and 5 different companies that make animal chips, each with their own databases. In the early days, vets or shelters might even scan a pet with a scanner that only reads the chip type they deal with, and if the animal comes up negative they often get injected with another chip… sometimes 3… now there are “multiscan” readers that will read multiple chip types (variations on 125khz encoding schemes mostly)… but ithe fact remains that those scans are not typically shared or recorded anywhere at all, and of those that are, it’s to a local database only.
Oh my God, Scanner Angel software is utterly hot garbage. The website has 2.3, 2.5, and 2.7 available for download, and the “2.5” installer installs 2.7. When I check for update, it tries to “update” me to 2.3.
And this is the first of much disgust – the app hard crashed like three times in five minutes, and couldn’t be cleanly updated in place to 2.5/7/whatever. Plus it’s slow! Unbelievably, painfully “is there a memory leak somewhere?” slow. I have no idea if it updated the goddamn database into the scanner. Hardware’s fine, but I just had to comment on the appalling state of the driver software.