Slashdot Mirror
RFID Tags in Euro Banknotes
psychictv writes "CNET News.com is reporting that Euro notes could be embedded with RFID tags in the future. 'RFID (radio frequency identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in...'" The EU has been considering this for a while. You'll never even know they're there.
science is a religion
"RFID (radio frequency identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in."
I think you'd be hard pressed to find an RFID tag that could record transaction information inside a bill. You'd need an external device to do the recording.
Now people in the EU will know who to sue when they get testicular cancer from all the Euros in their front pockets.
Trolling is a art,
That would make robberies pretty pointless. If your cash register knows what money is in it, you can press the button to say "it was all stolen" and then no other connected cash register will accept that money anymore unless you get it authenticated by the police or whatever... I can see many massive misuses, but there's also a lot of potential good uses...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
According to this doo-hickey here, you've got money in your shoe too...
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
They'll never notice that you've taken them out.
Micrrowave your cash today!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
"RFID tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in.
Wonderful. Now how am I supposed to buy porn? Can't use credit card, it gets tracked. Can't use cash, it gets tracked. And with the price of porn these days, who's strong enough to haul around that much change?
Since we all know portable RFID readers will become available commerically, what's to stop a thief from carrying around his reader and then summing up how much people in the street have in their wallets? Just wait around late at night, wait for some woman to walk by with $300, and then just rob her? I'd bet there would be more muggings if the average pay went from $40 to a few hundred...
Damn, I didn't realize they could be that small.. I don't know how durable it would be though? If there was a way to make certain that they were in the notes, I could see it being a nice way to check to see if the notes added up to the value punched in by the cashier: a kind of redundancy. It would take a while til the new notes with these things were in decent enough circulation to make this viable, but would still be interesting. Too many people would start to rely on it though, which might not be a good idea.
:)
I'm just wondering how easy it would be for something that tiny to get scratched/cut off? I'm not so worried about privacy implications (maybe I'm not paranoid enough), but I'm sure there'll be some posts of that line soon enough.
No, I haven't read the article.
Why bother? Why not push for full digital convergence and have everyone use EFT for ALL transactions? We're headed that way anyway, I haven't used paper cash in nearly a month now for anything.
I have no tag line
"Well, I see you picked up this 5 Euro note as change for your purchase of Zovirax on May 12th at the BogoPharm pharmacy on the South Side. You know, you really should be more careful about who you sleep with, Mrs. Zambezi."
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Now I can launder my money in the microwave oven.
European Drug Distributor: Hello, Mister Colombian Drug Lord. Here is the money, I promised you.
Drug Lord: Hola, my French friend. I assume you've prepared the money as I specified?
Distributor: Indeed! Not only are these new notes, freshly received through my cover business, but they have been washed in muddy water, microwaved, and then dried in my daughter's basement.
Drug Lord: Ecellent! Here is the ten kilos of my finest cocaine. Good day to you!
Yeah, a real drug transaction isn't going to go nearly like this, but having the money check what kind of transactions its going through isn't going to work if there is *any* kind of money laundering going on and if *any* kind of competant disabling of RFID tags takes place.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Um, excuse me. What about the privacy factor in all this?
If the government / police are able to track illegal transactions then what is stopping them looking at my normal transactions? I don't want just anybody having access to the information about where I buy everything from my lunch to my porn.
This is cash we are talking about and they wanna watch it. Pfft.
Cheap web hosting
Strippers, hookers, drug dealers, public utilities, congress persons, ...
See the connection?
You can get rfid tags with storage capability. Think you can get tags with about 4kb of storage right now.
Check the faq at rfid.org
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
There is no valid reason for tagging the money, since anyone who wants a transaction trail could use an e-cash card.
The Powers are going to eliminate the cash economy. Period. Nothing and no one escapes the net.
We are entering a prison like no other in history, for it will be the entire world.
So, my question is, if RFIDs are to be embedded in money, will it still be accepted if the RFID is off or not working. Will you have to take it to a bank (hassle) and get the whole note replaced or REactivated?
I would think people that work in highly magnetic work conditions or that are subject to mild radiation (cell phone users, utility workers, possily computer users) might face this problem.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Kinda frightening that there are so many posts with this same logic.
Remember back in 1999 when people were talking about how the Y2K bug would result in society reverting to bartering & precious metals currency?
I wonder if eliminating cash as a nontraceable currency will prompt the emergence of additional non-fiat currency preferred by the privacy-conscious.
I can hear it now: "That non-DRM PC will cost you $3000 credit, $2900 cash, $600 in gold, or 10 cartons of banned cigarettes."
This is a good thing... for the US!
Before the Euro, the international black market dealt mostly in American currency. Part of the reason for that is the fact that it behooves the US economy's controllers to have large amounts of it's currency base outside of the country. (Think about it. Print more money, buy 'things' with it, make sure monies paid leave country. Monies are not local to the economy, so inflation does not increase. Oversimplified, yes, but I'm making a general point here.)
The Euro was a threat to that black market monopoly. A strong Euro would be serious competition, and would likely drive at least some of the US's expatriated currency back within its own borders, wreaking havoc with the economy.
With the advent of tracking capabilities in the currency itself, the Euro is keeping itself out of the black market, which is good for the United States.
Europe had a chance to take a bite out of US hegemony. So much for that ^_^
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
If you buy that much pr0n, I bet you have at least one arm strong enough to carry the change.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
That would make US dollars a lot more popular in some important quarters, which the EU doesn't want. Therefore, I predict that the Euro will get these embedded tags only after the U.S. starts seeding them into its own currency. The desire to create a "cashless society" here, and eliminate untraceable commerce, has a long and sordid history.
The problem with embedding these things is that they're easily fused, so banks would also need to start refusing fused notes, and people would have to start carrying detectors because they might otherwise end up with undepositable paper. The alternative is that fused notes are still negotiable, but then they would all get fused in short order.
Encrypt the bill's serial number with the treasury dept's private key?
Seems like that'd be pretty effective...
Of course, they can't possibly make this a *required* feature of all bills. You have to be able to microwave the money and still use it, otherwise y'all Europeans will start screaming bloody murder.
The privacy invasion happens when you aren't paying attention: When you don't realize that your subway card placed you at the scene of the crime, or whatever. As they gain more and more surveillance techniques, eventually it'll be impossible to pay attention to all of them.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This could destroy thieves and black markets.
You misspelled "personal privacy of any kind".
"...the net could report that you've been mugged immediately and 'deactivate' all those notes..."
and no doubt make an appropriate entry into your Total Information Awareness database file.
Or, to look at it from the other angle, if you are engaged in any "suspicious" behavior, what's to stop the TIA/Dept of Homeland Security system from deactivating your money?
I don't like this one bit. Nosir.
What part of "Euro Banknotes" didn't you understand? This has nothing to do with the land of the (supposedly) free, but with the union where we have mandatory ID cards, strict weapon laws and people who see black boxes in cars as a /good/ thing and don't distrust the government like the mostly paranoid americans.
All my Euros already have a serial on them, so if somebody wants to trace them from the ATM to the grocery, they could already do so. This paranoid mentality, which seems to be really popular around Slashdot is really bewildering to me.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Of course, it depends on the technology used for the RFID.
They really should use passive microwave resonance tags.
They're not affected by magnetic fields, are smaller, cheaper, more durable than silicon based RFID, flexible, can be 'printed' into currency, and are not reproducible, among other advantages.
When money becomes trackable, perhaps even beyond the ability of a microwaving to fix, I will make it a regular habit to ask friends and acquaintences if they'd like to enter into an ongoing money swap arrangement. People engaged in this practice will make it a habit to carry, say, $200 in cash, and will make it a point to swap bills every so often. As long as this is an ongoing practice, it's not even necessary to efficiently randomize who has what bills; all you need to do when questioned by Homeland Security about hookers/dope/etc is profess to be a money swapper, and offer to call numerous witnesses to that fact; ergo, anyone could have been the person who plunked down bills that the atm originally dispensed to you. And the social practice of swapping bills will serve to draw like-minded people together.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.