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Utah Leads the Way Toward RFID Privacy Legislation
An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports that Utah's House of Representatives passed the first-ever RFID privacy bill this week, 47-23. Utah state Rep. David Hogue said that without laws to ensure consumer privacy, retailers will be tempted to match the data gathered by RFID readers with consumers' personal information. 'The RFID industry will carry the technology as far as they can,' said Hogue, sponsor of the Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know Act. 'Marketing people especially are going to love this kind of stuff.'"
Complain all you want, but when voters care, issues happen.
My uninformed opinion of Utah is that there attitude is kinda like.
"We protect our own, you outsiders go away"
Note that there is interest from California, and Massachusetts.
They point out the Senator from Massachusetts sponsored an antispam bill. Even if the bill wasn't perfect, it did pass, and at least he is trying to do something. Perhaps with the right help he can do better with RFID?
Actually your HTTP Referrer is sent by your browser by its own choice, you can turn it off, and in some browsers even have it smartly decide when to send the referrer and when to keep quiet, it can also send a 'fake' address based on the current one to allow leeching etc.
An RFID tag on the other hand is more like a trojan condom/malware/spyware etc.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
For your particular example, why not just turn off sending referrer information in your browser? The prefbar has a nice check box that lets you turn off sending referrer whenever you like.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
mozilla and other browsers allow you to control the referrer sent to sites.
you can make it lie and say you were referred by h0t-chixx0r-sex.com
that will get them wondering 8)
or you can just enter the site manually into your location bar, in which case there is no referrer...
"None of the retail tests of RFID tags invaded the privacy of shoppers in the Wal-Mart stores, Roberti [editor of RFID Journal] said. He also said that RFID chips in building security passes and toll-booth tags have never been used to invade a citizen's privacy."
New Yorkers were conned into installing EZPass toll ID systems around our entire infrastructure by a lying Mayor Giuliani who promised that the logs would be tightly protected, available only by court order and subpoena after due process, evidence discovery, legal confidentiality, all the rights by which we protect ourselves from our governments. Once up and running, it turned out that $50 through any low-rent lawyer could buy the logs from the cops, at first used in divorce cases, and now surely used for whatever pretext is convenient to invade our privacy.
Now the industry continues the lies to propagate their bugs throughout our consumer society. The deployment of the tech is inevitable, their lies as well. But our privacy rights can win, if we maintain zero tolerance for these invasions, and the liars who would have us pay for our own illegal surveillance. Join or promote the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The freedom you save will be your own.
--
make install -not war
Oh, so you mean they are trying to automate menial tasks to make more profit? And you're concerned because this has never been done before? Here's an idea: go to each Walmart location and smash these RFID readers you speak of. Ned Ludd would be proud.
In order to work correctly, those tags do some kind of handshake with the base station and demand a timeslot for communication.
There is work on jammers that just simulate a really high number of different recievers, thus preventing any timeslot from actual use.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
If you like any of those things then you might like Utah. If you are not LDS and like those things then even better, because the Mormons aren't doing those things on Sunday. I don't ski on Sunday so I am relying on my friends who do for this info, but they insist that the slopes are nearly empty on Sundays.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Not to mention the best and insightful press coverage on SCO shenanings have come from Utah newspapers.
I am not mormon but have lived in southern Utah (actually close to Colorado City) and I must say Utah is one of the best states in the union (just bring your own beer)!
They're pushing for legislation to *protect* our privacy. At least, in the article linked to the story, they are.
RFID's are an interesting thing -- but one that people haven't thought through when they decide to get paranoid about them.
But here's the real ticket: You know all those 'Visa Check Card' commercials? Since they've become more common, ever notice how much people use a check card to buy everything from groceries to gasoline?
So, you go to the grocery store to get some groceries. You go to the checkout counter, they scan the bar codes, and the sale is stored in a database, itemized completely. Then you swipe your credit-card (or check card) to purchase said groceries. Your credit card is linked directly to your identity, which is then linked to the items purchased, and the retailer has the beginnings of a customer profile on you. Same story at Best Buy, CompUSA, or anyplace else with a credit/debit card reader.
So how this kind of linking differs from an RFID tag, which is essentially a faster bar-code (in the case of retail purchases) really does escape me... If you're that paranoid about T.H.E.M.M. (The Hegemony of Evil Marketers and Merchants) keeping track of your purchases, then pay cash -- RFID's just make it so you get to the point you fork the stuff over more quickly than bar codes do. Hell, I imagine paying by check would be just as effective, because who in their right mind is going to spend the time to link the check to a particular purchase? OCR isn't that good yet...
Case in point: Before February, I've never purchased gasoline at a Chevron station. More to the point: I've never paid for fuel with anything but cash before. Well in February, I decided to both get some petrol from a Chevron station, and to pay with my check card; not a really big deal, right? Imagine my suprise when days later I recieved a letter in the mail offering a Chevron credit card! (having never heard from the company before).
Bottom line: RFID's won't make privacy problems any worse than they already are. Your worst fears about RFID's have pretty much already come to pass.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
No. There exists no technology today which can effectively determine distance from an RFID tag -- let alone the actual location of it. I am aware of current work at Intel and within academia upon the subject, but this is far from working and typically relies, even in theory, upon extremely large and expensive arrays of reader antennae. However, most commercial tags have an extremely short range (absolute max. of a foot or so), so the point is moot. Even current "long-range" readers (which, BTW, are still very unreliable) begin reaching practical maximums by 7ft.
Many [uninformed] people on Slashdot are unaware of the details of the technology and thus do not know about the deterimental range and reliability problems with current [extremely expensive] high-end technologies. Also, many Slashdot users have overlooked the potential privacy advantages of RFID relative to other location-sensing technologies such as GPS-- proximity is inherently ambiguous, decentralized, and infrastructure-dependent.
- An RFID researcher
For your information.
"Mormon" is a nick name for members of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Those found to be practiceing plural marrige are excommunicated. I've heard them called mormon fundamentalist, but I don't see anything fundamental about how they practice. This is true, not only in spite of history, but particularly in veiw of it.
And yes, such do exist in Utah.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Ok- you seem to have a history with the LDS church. Tell me, when was the last General Conference that you heard a leader of the church claim that whites are better than blacks, or that people should treat different races poorly, or that white people are smarter than black people? There is a reason that you don't hear them teaching this- IT IS NOT PART OF THE CHURCH'S DOCTRINE! On the contrary, you WILL hear the leaders of the church encouraging people to be kind and treat other people with respect, and that we need to be humble in our relations with other people.
Brigham Young said a lot of things. He said that he doesn't think black people are smart. He also said that he likes to eat baked potatoes. He was a Prophet, does that mean that God wants us all to eat baked potatoes? McConkie wrote some hateful sounding things, but there is a reason his book is not canonized scripture- because thats not what the church teaches!
Its true that the LDS church did not give the Priesthood to black people before 1978. Why? I honestly don't know, and neither do you. For all we know, it could have been because God was pissed at the white people for being to proud. Whatever the reason, its not applicable today.
You see, the Mormon church does not teach people to be narrow-minded. On the contrary, it teaches its members to question everything personally.