It's standard practice in the veterinary field to microchip pets. So standard, in fact, that some 3.5 million household animals in the US have little rice-sized chips in them, helping rescue groups reunite owners with their furry friends in the event that a pet gets loose.
It's also standard that microchipping is run as a for-profit business – and as one microchip company in Texas is showing, businesses don't always pan out.
This week, the Washington Post reported that Save This Life — a chipping and records company responsible for safeguarding pets throughout the US — had been listed as inactive on Texas' comptroller tax records. Though the company's website remains online, no one is answering emails, phone calls, or inquiries into pets‘ chips.
That's leaving pet owners, shelters, and veterinarians concerned, as the company likely holds records related to “tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands” of microchips, president of non-profit chipping service AKC Reunite Tom Sharp told WaPo.
The pet microchipping process is a little convoluted. In most cases, the microchips themselves don't have any of the pet owner's data, as is sometimes assumed.
Instead, a veterinarian scanning a chip will find an 8-12 digit string of numbers that can be used to find which microchip company's database the pet is registered to. Once a kennel or vet has the database, they can get ahold of that company which will then relay the pet's exact details.
It's an interesting case of digital property rights — a pet owner paying for their critter to be microchipped and registered expects that chip to stay relevant for life. In fact, that's exactly what Save This Life currently promises on its site.
But what happens to all that data when a company goes kaput?
That's an important question for activists and researchers working with digital property rights, which has been a contentious issue of debate for as long as digital data has been around. The argument usually revolves around personal information or non-physical media and its stewards, which are more often than not for-profit corporations. But corporations are bought, sold, and dissolved all the time; such is the nature of business.
In other words, as digital rights advocates have argued: “if you don't own your digital property, you rent it.”
For example, what happens if a development company shuts down the servers running a video game that was online-only? Anyone who paid money for that game will no longer be able to access it, and the experience will be lost to time, while the company that sold the copy is under no obligation to return its revenue.
That's a relatively harmless case — unless you work in media preservation — but as more and more of our data finds its way out of our hands and into the hands of big companies, it's raising questions about what obligations they have to ensure transparency and access.
And in the case of microchips for our furry friends, it seems that profit, not love of pets, may be the deciding factor.
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