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.'"

Comments

Voter issues

[nuggz]

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?

Re:Voter issues

[BWJones]

Utah has given the tech world many advances, Novell, WordPerfect, Altiris etc.

So, despite the drawbacks of living in Utah, it turns out that Utah is actually one of those stealth components to technology. The University of Utah in particular has been a powerhouse in computer graphics and has produced doctorates from such folks as John Warnock (founder of Adobe), David Evans and Ivan Sutherland (Evans & Sutherland), Tom Stockham who created the field of digital recording, Alan Kay (Xerox PARC and developer of the GUI), now a fellow at Apple computer, Alan Ashton (founder of Wordperfect), Henri Gourard (creator of Gourard shading), Ed Catmul (co founder of Pixar), Jim Clark (co founder founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape).

I have been quite surprised at the depth of the CS program here and we are working with a number of folks on projects that have great interdisciplinary potential. And it turns out that Utah is a pretty good place to live if you like the outdoors and such.

Re:Marketing people really are awful

[t_allardyce]

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.

Re:Marketing people really are awful

[claar]

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.

what's the problem?

[bani]

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...

tangled web of RFID lies

[Doc Ruby]

"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.