Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Lady Bugs for RFIDs?
 
RFID for Commerce is Surveillance?
 
Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer
 
Cattle-Driving the Future
 
Rich Client, Poor Client, Smart Client, Web Client
 
Accountability and Transparency for Credibility
 
In an ALGOL State of Mind
 
The Ever-Shifting Tide of Communication and Civil Literacy
 
We Must Like Blogger Because ...
 
Satisfying Generated Wants

Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

RG News: The Smell Of RFID Tags.  I notice that there is an assumption, in the scarier accounts, that RFID tags can be updated to carry complex information.  For example, it is speculated that purchasing history can be carried by an RFID built into a credit card.  My sense of the current technology is that the association is done behind the scenes and accomplished in massive data aggregation activities, not on the RFID (or the credit card).  The impact might be the same, but the methodology is quite different.  What I see here is a seriously overblown assumption about what the technology is capable of, in any reasonably-near future, and this over-generalization discredits accounts such as this summary on Robin Good's Latest News.  It is likely to be regarded by legislators and decision makers as idiot radicalism.

I think the problem around this technology being intrusive is that it is near-invisible.  While this article emphasizes this action:

Consumers must insist that RFID tags be easily visible, removable and turned off at checkout.

this injunction becomes meaningless if consumers are not equipped to verify it.

I do have a few modest suggestions that might be more effective as social action.

Whittier Daily News - Opinion.  Robin Good's source is Lenore Skenazy's 2004-06-25 Whittier Daily News.com opinion piece.  The article addresses RFID as a universal surveillance system.  Here the description of an RFID as a "bar code on steroids" is more apt, although the leap into outrageous extrapolations almost qualifies this article as an urban e-mail hoax.

Again, the example of what the RFID reports is exaggerated.  The RFID just reports what it always reports, it doesn't carry the history of its voyage from manufacturer to a garmet you are wearing.  It is in the uniqueness of that identification, and its availability, that provides the basis of surveillance.  That is all it needs.  In the cinema, when someone places a tracking beacon on a vehicle, the beacon doesn't do the work, the trackers do.  This might be a better way to view the situation.

Now, that does not alter the fact that a fine basis for surveillance is available, and that this is commercially valuable and potentially just as important to everyone's Department of Homeland Security and everyone who might be spying on them.

So the scary scenarios don't work as described.  The RFID needs to be scanned repeatedly at different places, and the scanning point needs to send its information somewhere that it can be aggregated with other information from other scannings of that same RFID.  This is not a trivial act, and yes, people are working on it.

It is more like my supermarket membership card.  All it has to do is identify itself.  The rest is handled by passing that identification, and my coincident purchasing information to a database system.  The easy part for the supermarket is they issued the card. They are not just trying to scan anybody's any-kind-of-card, and connecting it to a data-collection and reporting system somewhere.  With RFIDs, the problem is more complicated.

What is more important is that the RFID is a kind of passive technology.  It responds to scans from any suitable scanner.  So, instead of worrying about who is scanning RFIDs in your possession, why not look at the opportunity we have in being able to scan the RFIDs in our environment?

Questions to self: Is there any selectivity in the scanning and response? (Obviously, for intentional surveillance, different kinds of RFIDs and readers might be developed and used; but what about the current case). When the vet scans our cats and notices that they have been "chipped," what other objects respond to those same scanners?  What other scanners would notice our cats, perhaps from a greater distance.  How many flavors of this technology are there?  If these are really equivalent to a homogenous system of very-long bar codes, I here point out that bar code scanners are now affordable enough to be consumer devices.  For the kind of tracking that people speculate about, that means scanners will be at least that affordable.  Probably more affordable than the video-recorder at the Rodney King beating.  Heh.

---

This little appendage is provided to force Blogger to see this article as having changed.  There's really no new content.  I am making this modification so that the Atom feed will supplant the previous modification that was published as a result of this defect.

posted by orcmid at 6/27/2004 03:21:34 PM