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Gillette Pulls RFID Tags In UK Amid Protests
akb writes "Indymedia UK is reporting that after protests against the trial of RFID tags by Gillette at a Tesco store in Cambridge, increasing press coverage, a boycott, and the growing mobilisation of campaigners against the intrusive use of the technology, Gillette have withdrawn their trial. RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are small tags containing a microchip which can be 'read' by radio sensors over short distances (for background see SchNEWS Feature / 2 part Guardian Article)."
As annoying as the bag checker is, (think Fry's) he doesn't come home with me.
In the article, they mention that the new EU copyright directive could make it illegal to deactivate RFID tags after you leave the store.
If they just included these tags on _packaging_, I would have no problem with it. But to include them in the product and then criminalize removal or deactivation is just wrong.
Eyes have the potential problem of a thief scanning your house to see what you have inside. Slashdotters unite! We must band together to ban optic nerves!
While funny, and apparently a good analogy, it fails for a very simple reason...
When people need to see what it would take to prevent unathorized scanning by optic nerves [sic], they can do so simply by looking around.
To prevent scanning by RFID tag sensors, one must first
A) Get a suitable detector
B) Configure it to read each and every of the potential wavelengths for all RFID tags,
C) Configure it to understand the protocol(s) and protocol variations for all RFID tags in the area
D) Then, without being able to actually see limits of the area being scanned, one must scan the entire area.
The issue isn't really the RFID tags, it's the relatively indefensible position they leave you in against somebody with more techology/money than you have.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
We keep hearing about the bad uses for RFID technology, but do people know of any good uses that don't invade on our privacy?
/. readers suddenly "blame the tool".
Yeah. Embedding it into the tag on my pants, rather than the pants themselves, for inventory management and anti-theft purposes. However, if we allowed that, and there wasn't a law against doing anything more invasive with it, you know that the RFID tag would slip from the tag on the pants to the inside of the fabric in the space of five years. And after that, if surveillance cameras are any indication, the government would find some invasive use for it and it would be protected under the usual argument: "Private businesses do it, so why not the government?"
That's the real problem. There are a lot of great, useful applications for RFID that aid both businesses and consumers, but there are also a lot of malicious/greedy uses for it. Since average citizens usually can't litigate multinational corporations into submission in the same way that the RIAA can sue Kazaa, Grokster, and their users,