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RFID for Commerce is Surveillance?

RFID for Commerce

We're discussing RFIDs in my Security Engineering class and I am clipping some resources about it.

ACM News Service: Embedding Their Hopes in RFID.  The economic realities of RFID employment, along with the privacy concerns, are featured in this blurb.

The Seattle Public Library seems to be using RFIDs in their automated check-out systems (similar to the automated check-out systems in some stores, except you just lay the library books down on an opaque surface).

Although there is a lot of attention on item-level tracking, most commercial use of RFID is for container, not item, tracking.  The little RFIDs are still too expensive to put on everything, and reader/scanner range is limited.  Those are all parameters that can only improve, though.

Jonathan Krim's 2004-06-23 Washington Post article (registration required) seems scarier to me.  His first example is on gaming chips in a gambling casino.  Prescription drugs are another example.  This main article is extensive, and there are some accompanying links.

At home, our cats are tagged (the expression is "chipped"), and your dentist will chip your kids.  In the article, there is an application to permit the subcutaneous tagging of people, initially as a kind of Med-Alert system.  It is clear what the benefits of these applications are, and it is not for surveillance as much as for identification and a kind of protection.  With RFIDs, one could plant chips on someone, and I think that is also how we are looking at the prospects for surveillance that the commercial use of RFIDs provides, in terms of the movement of products being tracked as we use them.

Future Now: Couple RFID-related articles.  This short blurb links to two articles: One in Technology Review that requires a subscription (or a minimum $4.95 US and then you have to cancel it to keep it from going month-to-month). The other is from Economist.com and is free for now.

Impact of RFID and other monitoring has four entries that I gleaned on 2004-02-24.

No Hiding Place.  A January, 2003, Economist article, involving science-fiction writer David Brin, on living transparently in the internet society.

I searched through this blog archive and I didn't find any other occurrences of RFID.  I suspect that a search on "privacy" might be more successful.

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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 6/25/2004 01:10:48 PM