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Cheap, Paper RF ID Tags To Replace Barcodes?
Chris writes: "From EETimes:
"International Paper Co. and Motorola Inc. have developed a low-cost RF identification system that could become commonplace on disposable items like cereal boxes, replacing the ubiquitous bar code."
While the article does mention that the cost of the technology must drop further (from about 10 to 30 cents per ID to a couple of pennies), it overlooks the potential impact on privacy. (Just imagine embedding these tags in your clothes.)"
On the other hand we won't need to worry about the police asking people to describe the suspect. Instead of "He was a caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan sportscoat and running shoes." We will get: "He was a white caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan JCPenny Sportscoat model 007958 item number 1119949396882. This same sportscoat was later scanned at 1610 Maple Street at Walt's Bar, and is currently believed to be in that area.
Theoretically, if you paid for your clothes with your credit card, the store would know that you bought the clothing. Those records could almost certainly be subpoenaed.
Of course it would be much more straightforward, and quite a bit more fun, to simply tatoo a bar code of your social security number on your forehead. Somehow I don't see that happening either. If you can't be paranoid on /., where can you be paranoid?
Briefly, in Sterling's world there is no such thing as privacy once someone cares enough to try tapping you. But this technology is so cheap and ubiquitous that anyone can use it to tag anyone else and trace them around. There is lots else besides. Strongly recommended.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Why should we not complain about it?
I think that privacy is very important. I don't want my information and habits collected without my knowledge and then shared amongst goverment agencies, corporate salespeople, or malicious information vandals. I want "opt-in" mailing, emailing, and calling lists to be the law in this country (USA), not the exception. I want encryption to be legal without restriction.
However, Chicken Littles who scream "privacy" every time some new technology surfaces make all of us concerned about privacy look like a bunch of extremist knee-jerk wackos. Extremist knee-jerk wackos tend to be ignored, and are excluded from the decision-making process because mainstream voters don't understand the issues involved and don't trust people who are always beating the same drum while yelling in a shrill voice.
Complaining about all of the possible threats is a waste of focus and a poor battle plan if you ever expect the general public to support the goals you're trying to accomplish. Instead of focusing on all of the possible privacy problems on the horizon, focus on the real ones that are here right in front of us. Be reasonable and work within the system wherever possible.
Unless you just like to complain and accomplish nothing, in which case... nevermind.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Technology steals jobs. We should get rid of evil things like bulldozers, cranes, machinery, farm equipment and employ people to perform all of those tasks. Let's get rid of computers too. If we are truly successful, we'll generate a lot of employment and maybe the US will become a perfect place to live in where the people are happy and there's plenty of employment. Kinda like Somalia, I guess.
Mmmm.. Donuts
These RF tags are perfect for tagging clothes, as the blurb pointed out. But an even more sinister use than tagging clothes is tagging the people who wear the clothes. And I'm especially referring to a certain kind of person:
Slavery is alive and well in this country, and I'm not referring merely to rhetorical or political slavery, but actual slavery. Women from foreign countries, particularly southeast-Asian countries are flown to America and promised low-paying but normal jobs performing menial labor or housecleaning services, but when they arrive, they discover to their horror that the real purpose is to prostitute themselves for the financial benefit of their masters. These women (and even children) are trapped, since they don't speak English, don't have the money to fly home, and don't have the physical or mental stamina to escape their tormentors after so much abuse.
How is this relevant to RF tags? Think of how much easier it would be to kidnap people from airports if all you needed to do was wander around with a small device, picking up the signals from the tags embedded in clothing given to the erstwhile immigrants back in their home countries. No longer would there have to be complicated networks of international communication -- they'd just have to agree on a certain range of serial numbers (of which there are trillions, as the article points out), hand out "free" clothes to people boarding the plane at departure, and sit back while agents at the US airports haul in the "goods".
This never would've been possible if we'd stuck to normal barcodes -- it's simply impossible to read barcodes surreptitiously. And since criminals are always the first to adopt new technologies for these devious purposes, it's only a matter of time before it comes to an airport near you, Thirteenth Amendment be damned.
-- Anne Marie
My boss could find me anywhere he wanted?
"Where's Louis? Activate the building wide EM field generator!"
"Sir, the sensors indicate a response in location F12"
"Where is that?"
"He's in his cube, sir!"
Alternatively:
"Sir, sensors indicate his shirt is in location F4 and his pants are in location F7, and that his shoes are in location E1"
"What?!"
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
But this is far from new stuff.
How Stuff Works had an article on anti-shoplifting measures that include paper tags like these.
If memory serves, I first saw this article from a url posted here at slashdot several months back. Interesting how this place recycles stories.
Tim
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
I hope you're not trolling. These are passive RF tags which have no power or activity of their own. They react to magnetic fields, though - kinda like the magnetic door passes most companies have in the employee badges.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Digital:Convergence's business model is ruined!
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I'm just curious. Would you want a job where, every day you worked you knew there was a machine that could do exactly what you did, but for half the cost and twice as fast? I don't see a lot of job satisfaction there. In this job, you are effectively a useless member of society. You are actually worse than useless, since you're keeping others from doing a better job. Would you want a job like that? On the flip side, would you want to employ someone in a position like that? You're basically giving money away for free.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"There are going to be trillions of tags like these on all kinds of consumer products, and they'll tell us exactly where those products are in the supply chain at all times," said Larry Kellam
"hmmm, all these 'Debby Does Dallas' tags are coming from that house, what a weirdo"
"the signatures from those 2 stolen cases of PS2's are coming from there..."
"click, click, Hey! that house over there has a tag for that new Expensive TV set, lets go break in and steal it!"
The great thing I see with these is that they probably will not be removable from the items that they are placed on (like bar codes). this would give you some great oportunities to develope some neat apps for the home.
Simply set a RF receiver in every room of your house. Loose something and you can querry your box to see where it is. Give your whereis command some real power!
Also no more expired milk! embed the expiration dates into the tags. Then your box can let you know that not only that the milk in the frig has gone bad but that it has reached a sentience level allowing it to plot and sceme against you. { Message to root: milk is hacking FBI database from your phoneline. disconnect Y/N : }
Papa Legba come and open the gate
This is pretty impressive from a scientific perspective. As for burning out the circuit, I'm not sure if that is possible. Unlike magnetic stuff, which can be re-polarized, if protections are taken, these circuits may not be able to be fried.
What I was really interested in, which was not mentioned in the article, was what kindof range are we looking at with something like this? If you had long range, how could you differentiate between the various circuit unless they all operated on different frequencies. If they were different frequencies, it would then be possible to locate a specific object in space via triangulation... that would be pretty nifty. A cheap tracking device.
However, given the fact that power must be transmitted to the device, my general feeling is that range is pretty small, since trasmitting power is nasty business.
As for invasion of privacy, I think there are some valid concerns here, but a serious discussion on that matter should probably wait until another day.
Captain_Frisk
You're right. We should also eliminate bulldozers, because they put so many ditchdiggers out of work. Cars put all those horse-and-buggy manufacturers out of work. Those stupid electronic telephone switches put a lot of operators out of work. All those horrible robots in car factories... my goodness.
How insensitive of us!
Gee, we could give a hundred million people toe-nail clippers and have them cut grass instead of a few lawnmowers... that would put more people to work than any government program yet conceived!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I mean, I'm sure this isn't a New World Order-Satano-One-World-Government mind control Area 51 ploy. I'm sure this is some retailer deciding "jeeze, if I had $1 every time someone couldn't scan a barcode cause it was on a chip bag or some other reflective, weird crinkly surface..." and the engineering mind thought of another solution.
OF COURSE the government will find nifty uses for it.
OF COURSE we will find ways around it.
OF COURSE criminals will find some way to exploit it.
OF COURSE the last two will be made illegal.
OF COURSE there will be "Digital Freedom" websites extolling measures for or against the previous three.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
The uses of recycled plastic are fairly limited - I expect this is largely because the different types of plastic can't easily be separated, so only low quality products that can withstand an unknown mix of types can be manufactured.
If every plastic bottle, cardboard box, whatever, had a very cheap RF id tag like this that identified what it was made of, the separation process could be much cheaper and the output much more homogenious and high quality.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Ask your librarian for your libraries rules. And if you don't want people to know what you buy, go to a store you don't go to often and pay cash.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The RF power that would nose these chips over will cook you and anything you blast with it. That would be something on the order of 1kW or more of RF power somewhere around the 2GHz area.
As for jamming, it's possible, but really only at close range- this stuff works by way of RF backscatter. Think of it being a sophisticated mirror of RF energy that encodes the carrier with information. The noise level's going to have to be up there to jam these at the ranges they're designed to operate at.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But it requires so much RF power that it'd be dangerous to burn them out.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, RF tags won't invade my privacy, so it won't be an issue for me. You know why? Because I'll be interested enough to find them and disable them.
Now, it could be a problem for you! I could drive next to your house on my bike with my palm pilot and antenna to see whatchya got in your house.
I think its a nice ethical gesture for nerds to discuss these issues. If you'd prefer, we could hide the ramifications of technology under the table. It would be a tough, cruel world if we did. Issues of privacy have grave importance.
If they are anything like the RF tags used by the major manufacturer, there is little to worry about. A small incision into the tag will break the circuit, rendering it useless. The problem with the current RF tags (as opposed to the magnetic ones) is that they are too failure prone. Even holding two tags close to each other can disable them. I still like bar codes, not much can go wrong there...
As for burning out the circuit, I'm not sure if that is possible.
First, place the tag in the microwave for a few seconds. Guaranteed.
Now, you can also assemble a transmitter of much lower power that can concentrate the beam to do the same damage in a brief pulse. Just 10 watts of RF power can do considerable damage to the target, including skin tissue. Did I mention smaller things are very portable? A crude small transmitter like this could fit in a purse.
There's a shoe maker we're working with (can't say for sure here, but they're really, really big) that is embedding Digimarc ids right into the graphics on the clothing. Labels, hang tags, even the back of watches are currently embedded. Kinda cool, in a way. Hold the item up to a camera (or any reader, if it's RF or visual barcode) and boom, you're at the website with info, support, whatever about that item. So, there are some advantages.
Jason
I remember some years ago people tried to sell something like this to the hog industry. The idea is that you'd put a small chip with an transponder and a small amount of storage in the hog's ear; then you would scan every time you did something to the hog (such as feed it). Tracking cost of sales is a big thing in the hog business. It turns out, however, that it wouldn't work because it would spoil the hog's ear (which apparently is a perfectly sellable commodity) and there's no part of the hog from the snout to the tail that isn't sold for some purpose or other.
Apparently undeterred by this, folks with similar technology started promoting it for use on children as a way to deter abduction. I believe uses of similar devices have been proposed for use in a variety of applications such as military medical care.
If the cue cat shows anything, it's that bar codes are a cheap legacy technology -- one that hasn't been particularly exploited. For example information densities could get a lot higher than the standard one dimensional bar code is capable of providing. Bar codes aren't going away.
I think there are lots of places where there would be applications for the new technology; places where bar codes might not be readable (this happened with attempts to bar code railroad cars -- they got so dirty automatic scanners failed) and places where you need field programmable data (shipping and luggage handling).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why would you need to send it in? Just use your anti-Cue:Cat 2000 to read the RFID tags, and send the data to the company. Since the tags are unique, they can be stored in a database so they can't be reused. No Mail necessary. We can put the US Postal service out of business :)
Well... we can at last save $1.50 on postage [yeah it might be that expensive by then]
Ender
Nothing to see here
Project Furby 2
CIA Requisition Order 2000-01275543
Referencing Department Purchase Order 19781A
Quantity Description Cost
1 GMC 1500 panel van $22,900
1 2x4 18 element Yagi $375
1 Plastic roof storage unit $225
1 2200W linear amplifier $2,400
1 RadioShack rotator $23
Total: $25,923.00
Goal:
To assess the concentration and usefulness of
RF-excited microtransmitters in gathering
domestic intelligence.
.sig: Now legally binding!
They're a function of the antenna size and RF power they're irradiated with...
The originators of this technology, Amtech, formerly a division of Intermec, now a division of TransCore, developed this technology during the Regan years to monitor the body temp, etc. of cattle to pick out sick animals before they went to the slaughterhouse.
One of the more common applications of this is the tags on each and every rail car in the US and Europe. These have a unique ID that identifies the rail car as it passes a zone antenna at speeds up to 160 MPH. Another one is the TollTags that many of the toll bridges, toll roads, etc. have taken to using worldwide. These are designed to be read at up to 40' away at speeds in excess of 100 MPH- through the window of your car.
If they want to, this same chip could be designed around a system that does what the seemingly paranoid claims about what could be done with the technology.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For what it is worth, the first few harmless moves made by a small, non-descript Austrian corporal were seen as not much of a threat and not much to worry about by any number of people, important and otherwise.
The end result was a lot of people losing liberty for a time and a (probably avoidable) conflict killing millions.
The road to Hell isn't paved with good intentions, it is paved with pebbles, each one of which didn't seem terribly significant.
If you don't have privacy, chances are shortly you won't have freedom.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
To bring our dog into the USA and ensure that we can take her back to Australia without any problems, she was tagged with a RF chip (about the size of a grain of rice) in the scruff of her neck. She is yet to have her eating habits processed, her urinary accomplishments scruntised, or sent to Washington to perform oral^H^H^H^H (sorry, that becomes law AFTER Bush gets in).
... 'Anarchists Cookbook'. Is that a load of fertiliser and diesel that you are tracking down Penn Ave?")
... get over it.
We are already tagged and traceable - get in your car (licence plate), use your credit card (location/spending habits), use you Ralph's card ("market research"), borrow a book at the library ("hmmm
There are too many people who confuse privacy with paranoia.
The article is about a replacement for barcodes
almost all types of RF tags carry no power source of their own.
they are merely a number encoded chip connected to an induction coil. when the coil is brought near an oscilating magnetic field it induces a current that drives the IC and emits a small amount of coded RF energy from a tiny antenna. simply make the driver field strong enough to cause the ohmic heating in the tag's induction coil to burn it out and no more "the gubment's trackin' me!" delusions to worry about.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
In the past I have been a cashier and I would have to say that the barcodes work just fine for all intents and purposes, in my opinion this technology would be a waste until it got to the point where it could be read from a few feet away. Imagine walking into a supermarket, and on your way out the door you don't need to go through a cash register, but instead it just automatically bills you?
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
I agree: just how far is a small paper tag going to transmit?
Perhaps not too far. That's when you turn up the exciter power until a satisfactory response is achieved. High gain directional antennas are wonderful. Aim the antenna to different portions of the house to scan the inventory.
Sounds like a fascinating project. Measure the range of these things and what you can get out of a house.
The Soviets used a system similar to this to spy on the US Embassy in Moscow about 20 years ago. They 'gifted' a wall emblem to the embassy, and of course it was checked for bugs, and no emissions were found, but it actually had embedded a long copper loop that acted as an induction coil.
The gist was, the KGB could park a van a block away and emit a very powerful high frequency sine wave at the embassy and the coil in the emblem would turn the EM flux into power to drive an embedded microphone and transmitter (using the same coil).
This went on for several years because the US regularly ran bug sweeps but it wasn't generating or storing any energy most of the time, and when it was being powered from the outside, the US figured it was some sort of attempt at jamming telecommunications within the embassy (which it was doing a very poor job of, being at the wrong frequency) so they basically ignored it.
Anyhow, this is all relevant because these RF tags are powered by inductance, which means any range limitation is purely a factor of the EM field powering it. There's no inheirent limitation in the device itself.
As for privacy, I don't care about tags in my cereal box. If I can walk out of a store and automatically debit my account instead of waiting in line, so much the better. If I can tie it to an anonymous cash card instead of my credit card, better still. If there's anything to worry about, it's the RF-powered listening devices, but since you probably don't run bug sweeps inside your own house on a regular basis, this isn't any more dangerous than an ordinary joe-blow X-10 camera bug in your shower.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
From browsing the web, quickly, it would seem that they can range from a few inches for a stamp sized 'reflector' to several feet for something the size of a sheet of paper.
I don't know how they plan to scan, though. Saturating a building with EM energy doesn't seem to smart. Perhaps a wand that directs energy towards the package would work, and just read the reflected energy.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
My former employer had a similar chip- I was designing enterprise class systems around the use of it.
The name of Intermec's product line using it is Intellitag 500[tm]. Little chip not much bigger than a glass head pin in diameter. Put it on stickers, etc. for inventory control, parking access/billing, etc. What makes Motorola's BiStatix chip special is that it doesn't need a foil antenna- conductive inks will do for most close-range applications.
Jamming them isn't going to be easy. They work off of RF backscatter- they don't transmit anything. They impress a modulation on a reflected carrier. They're basically a very fancy RF mirror and reflect ANY RF in the range that they're tuned for.
Overloading them isn't going to be very easy. The power levels are in the ball park of 500-1000 watts of RF power. Most of these units operate in the 900MHz, 2GHz, or somewhere around 5GHz in Europe. You'll cook yourself with these power levels.
Oh, and the original trade-press releases from Motorola were around the January/February timeframe. I believe that EE Times originally covered this sometime around June, if memory serves.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This article here does a great job explaining how EAS (Electronic Article Surveillence) works. This article pretty much seems to cover an advanced, optimistic use for the item besides busting shoplifters.
- Slash
Wouldn't it be easier to: 1) go through the trouble of taking that tag out/off of whatever it came on. 2) throw it out?
Today, it sure is. Just wait until they start embedding these things within the paper pulp in the cardboard binding of packages and books. It could blend in nicely with the fibers. One could still find the element by looking at the changes of fiber density for what would be an obvious flaw in normal paper. Then, simply excise it with a razor.
But, what if... if... if there were more than one? That is the question.
(Just imagine embedding these tags in your clothes.)
Oh, my God, people could.. well, um, they could, well, um, what am I missing here?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Further information about the RFID tags and related technologies is available at the MIT Auto-ID Center homepage.
Do geeks in general tremble at the thought that someone may be invading their own private space, or does Slashdot have an agenda?
Week, by week, by week the great Gods of Slashdot deliver upon us editorialized half-rants about privacy concerns---and it just does not seem like that big a deal to me.
Just applying a decent strength RF field will burn out the circuit.
An antenna can always act as a reciever as well as a transmitter.
This is how some anti-shoplifting tags work (although most are magnetic) and applying a strong RF field is precisely how they're disabled.
This also suggests an interesting denial of service, if you can get the RF strength high enough from *outside* the building where they're being used.
"Bar codes were a giant leap forward for their time because they made it quick and easy to capture data," said Sanjay Sarma, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.). "But these new chips have the potential to completely eliminate the human element, which even the bar code couldn't do."
yeah, just let lose the Nanites and they'll go swarm all the house that have tags for any OpenSource book or cd or any other media, reducing it down to raw materials for more M$ CDs/DVDs (since office 2005 will come on 5 DVD ROMs)
Hmm, so now when I walk through an airport scanner they are going to know that I'm wearing a pair of Levi's and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt?
Not to mention a $20 bill in my pocket, since US currency has had these magnetic strips for years now.
Still not quite sure how this relates to privacy since it doesn't identify you as a person.
Indeed, the BiStatix concept is so simple that the Motorola engineer who co-invented it, Noel Eberhardt, often demonstrates it by using a pencil to create an antenna on a piece of paper. By applying graphite to paper, and then attaching the BiStatix chip to the graphite antenna, Eberhardt has been known to create a working model of the concept in less than a minute.
It's funny that pencils and Eberhardt are mentioned in this same paragraph... isn't Eberhart-Faber one of the leading Pencil/Pen manufacturers?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The cool thing technologically is that this new tag is powered electrostatically, rather than electromagnetically. The detector system probably involves two big conductive plates that stuff goes between. It's inherently a short-range system.
That was the range that Intermec's IntelliTag 500 series tags were getting- and they're almost identical in ability.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why in the world would you want to not use a technology that the perform a task more cheaply and accurately than people?! Are you insinuating that someone who loses a job to technology cannot get another?
It sounds to me like you are saying we should not use technology because it would put people out of work who, I assume, could not be employed in other ways. Should we keep a certain percentage of shit jobs around just so these unemployable people will have somewhere to work?
I hate to break the news to you, but business are run to make money, not employ people. Here's a note from the clue train: economics is not a zero-sum game... increased technology opens up far more jobs than it eliminates, as you pointed out. Should we keep some people doing dull grunt work so the rest of us technology-haves can live in our ivory towers or should we work to educate, train and enrich everyone.
Again, how is this any different from the ridiculous examples in my previous post? If I am so ignorant... please enlighten me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
That's how Intermec was doing most of the systems. There's notable exceptions (something VERY much like the TollTag systems in use...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For your father's sake, I should hope they don't cause cancer. Did he keep his wallet in his front or back pocket? Either way, that can't be good.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You apparently don't understand a lot about RF...
Concentrating energy like that only works with light because of it's small wavelength. At these frequencies, your wavelength is measured in centimeters- you're not going to get a smaller spot than the wavelength without a LOT of trouble. Since a couple of milliwats per centimeter isn't enough to overwhelm the chip or burn anything, you're back to square one.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Flying Null, a breakaway company from Scientific Generics, and engineering consultancy in Cambridge, UK, developed a system like this 5 years ago.
The name of the company, Flying Null, was due to the technique used. By setting up a region where competing EM forces were exactly balanced (a null), when tiny objects (the tags) with particular properties were brought into the null they'd disrupt the balance, and would be detectable. How do you scan a broader region of space? Simple - set up the balance differently, and get the null to fly around the place...
And the cost of the tags? In bulk, pennies, and that was 5 years ago.
(SG was 150 employees, about 50 engineers at the time, and only 5-10 were involved in Flying Null.)
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Is that really necessary? Wouldn't a normal wash/dry cycle contain enough abuse to disable the RF tag?
What's the effective distance on these things? I didn't see it in a quick scan through the article. It's not like they could scan your ID code from 10 feet away...
(Just make sure they don't try to print one of these suckers on your forehead or the back of your hand...)
--
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I don't see the good side with using this. With these there will no longer be lots of jobs in the food industry for inventory of products at stores. Yes the company may turn profits but it doesn't always have to use the model of costing employees jobs. I personally like to see companies turn profit and always hiring for all types of jobs. This helps the economy plus lowers unemployment. They can hire someone to try and reduce theft if it will save money in the millions. Granted they won't save as much but at least they are keeping employees.
On the other hand, it can bring about two major application uses: shoplifting is one, as this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now. The other is from an AT&T commercial (I think), where you push your grocery cart into a stall, wait a moment, and your total rings up, speeding checkout lines. Possibly even 'smart' cupboards and refridgerators could come from this.
Sure, there's privacy issues in some of these cases, but they're the same privacy issues that we deal with now with those frequent shopper cards. The technology really doesn't introduce anything new.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: