RFID Hell

Matrix2110 writes "Finally, somebody has stepped up with an article that descibes the potental abuse of RFID. Imagine being flagged for social tendencies. Gattaca is not so far off as we think. it is simply a pass of a wand for your embedded tag rather than a drop of blood."

Comments

Article has nothing to do with RFID tags

[Shoden]

The device described in the article is a GPS device worn on the ankle combined with a cell phone. It's an active device, unlike RFID which is usually passive and concealed.

Nope

[pantycrickets]

Finally, somebody has stepped up with an article that descibes the potental abuse of RFID.

If you want to see stuff actually pertaining to RFID.. all you have to do is google.

here

Or here

ZERO to do with Gattaca as well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gattaca was about genetic manipulation, not GPS, RFID, or anything in that realm.

Tollway tags are mostly passive.

[Svartalf]

Very, very few RFID devices are active in the sense that you're using.

The power requirements needed to provide range, etc. are enormous and an active tag would usually be the size of a cell-phone and have about the same operational lifetime.

RFID is limited in range under most cases because of the power requirements and the fact that most of these devices have electrically small antennas, limiting the effective power they can radiate. Because of this, the devices in question have range limits- dramatically small ones and you can't say that someone like the NSA has the resources to detect them at longer ranges. The signal at 12 or so feet from most tags are so deep in the noise floor that you're not going to get enough coherent signal to detect it with any tech we are going to have in the forseeable future.

In the case of the tollway tags, they may/may not have a battery in them, but the battery isn't to power a transmitter, nor does it make them active. The battery is there to shorten the turn-on time for the tag. Most of those tollway tags have an incredible range because they're not transmitters or traditional transponders (like most RFID tags), they are very sophisticated RF reflectors that resonate at the specified frequency and impinge a carrier on the reflected signal.

Sort of like putting an LCD in front of a mirror to modulate what its reflecting back to a light source.

All the power is in the reader. And even these devices tend to have a range of only about 20-30 yards. The range is there because you're stacking the deck- if the tag is oriented wrong, you capacitively couple the tag to a larger conductor (hold the thing cupped in your hands), or anything other than that relatively precice placement and the range goes to practically nothing or the reader can't even see it.

If you do not understand how RFID really works, you really and truely should learn how it does before making comments about the same.

Uses for RFID...

[Svartalf]

The original use for the RFID technology that one of my former employers, Amtech (Animal Management TECHnologies), manufacturer of many, if not most of the tollway tags, was to help detect sick cattle in a feedlot/stockyards situation by pulling certain biometrics off the animal through a backscatter tag as the animals were passed from one location to another. Some illness in the human species comes from eating infected animal flesh.

As for something that you absolutely need RFID for, well, I wouldn't say you NEED it, but it can help for things like tracking/updating vehicle registration, for example.

Another thing is to handle logistics (which is what in the hell they're doing with those merchandise tags, by the way)- or in other words, track things like packing boxes of shoes from the manufacturer to the store so they know how many got there, etc.

Sure, RFID can be misused- it's just difficult to impossible to do the things the people keep going on about with it. Simple physics gets in the way, for starters- the RF power re-radiated from a tag is miniscule and limits the range to about 6-12 feet and after that the falloff is a logrithmic function, with the signal going quickly deep below the noise floor, such that it's undetectable by most anything we can come up with now or in the forseeable future...