A MILLION LITTLE ID TAGS - Popular Science Magazine, February 2007 (archiving magazine articles)

A MILLION LITTLE ID TAGS - Popular Science Magazine, February 2007:

"Unmistakable identification keeps car thieves away from your ride.

THE THREAT: More than one million vehicles are stolen in the U.S. every year, with a total value of over $7.6 billion. And once thieves remove license plates and vehicle identification numbers, there's no way of knowing who the vehicles once belonged to.

THE SOLUTION: Datadot Technology - a startup company in Australia which has the highest rate of vehicle theft in the developed world—has devised a way to cover valuable items in identifiers as small and invisibly scattered as hairspray droplets on a bouffant. Transparent DataDots are laser-etched with an identification number unique to you and glued to every internal surface of your car, boat or laptop, The sheer number of sand-grain-size dots on treated possessions—up to 5,000—makes it all but impossible for thieves to take them off and sell the harvested parts. In contrast, existing theft-deterrent systems such as a LaJack can be hidden in only one of about 20 places, and so can be removed much more easily.

Cops determine who stolen property belongs to by using a 50x magnifier to read the dots. If a person reporting a theft mentions that the item was Data-Dotted, police departments can access a company-run international database to find out if the car has turned up elsewhere. '"