logoalt Hacker News

Your pet's microchip may now be useless after chip company goes out of business

13 pointsby cpetersotoday at 3:38 AM9 commentsview on HN

Comments

tomyedwabtoday at 5:04 AM

The title is misleading: the chip isn't useless, it is basically NFC and can be read just fine. The number on it can be looked up in a registry to notify the owner of a lost pet. I believe there is nothing preventing you from registering the same number with multiple registries. Hope that helps.

show 1 reply
ggmtoday at 3:40 AM

This has happened before. I think given the legalisms around pets, ownership, responsibility, all of the chip registry companies should have been required to put the data into escrow, with a recovery plan and a handler of last resort in the form of a CSV file or something.

show 1 reply
yftsuitoday at 5:01 AM

The microchip stores nothing but a serial number. I don’t quite understand the design that you would need a vendor to maintain a database between the serial and owner information, why not just store owner phone number like a traditional dog tag?

show 1 reply
treeskneestoday at 4:46 AM

Is it safe to get multiple chips? They’re about the size of a grain of rice, so it shouldn’t be too unwieldy to get chipped from a couple of different vendors at the same time. With a chip, GPS collar, maybe an AirTag, that’s about all you can do besides lots of training.

show 1 reply