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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.'"
Has RFID users formed their own lobby yet? Retailers have their own. Notice how powerful Walmart is in that respect. They will just lobby the US Congress to create an over-riding law allowing RFIDs to be used as the retailers see fit. Vote smarter next time around and everyone vote!
A tech law in advance of the tech.
That's the way it should be, rather than trying to throw together a hack job after the tech has been around for a while.
hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such RFID-paranoia movies as "1984 mhz" and "My Radio Receiver Knows what you Did Last Summer"
I mean who wants your retailer to know when you buy condoms or somethng equally personal. Really, technologically speaking, we are not far from the thought police at all.
Can I bum a sig?
Thanx for listening,
Consumer 0556672GXX89F2
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Nice for them... Now if they can control what thier senator wants to do on a national level then we can talk...
I wrote a letter to NewEgg, asking them to stop using HTTP Referrer on their site, because I thought it a privacy concern. Their response: "Unfortunately the HTTP Referrer Header cannot be eliminated because it is an essential tool for our Marketing Department used to monitor where we are getting our web traffic from so that we can improve future campaigns to focus on more specific demographics. Please accept our humblest apologies for any inconvenience." I have tried not to shop at NewEgg ever since, because the idea of gathering information on my web viewing habits WITHOUT informing me, and without my consent, really does bother me.
My main point here though is that this is just one example of how marketing people will do ANYTHING to gather information about people. Without a privacy policy, I think the folks in Utah are right, things like RFID will be used to gather personal information about consumers.
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?
Why come out with a new law each time there is a new form of technology? Just make it illegal to use ANY electronic database to surreptitiously track people. This can include facial recognition, RFID, gait recognition, electronic nose systems, cell phone triangulation, licence plate OCR, or any possible unforseen technological advances.
but unless others follow suit, I now have a reason to move to...
Utah...
*shudders*
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
In some ways this is the ultamate offshoring of a service job. The labor of checkout clerk is moved to the chip factory where the tage is made and the shoe factory where the tag is inserted.
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
I for one welcome our RFID tag abusing overlords.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
> Is there such a thing as an RFID tag locator?
How about an RFID Reader Card for your laptop or PDA? You can get one for $150.00ish US from Syscan International (http://www.syscan.com). It fits a CF slot or PCMCIA with an adapter.From an article in RFID Journal
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/
"The read range is just five to 10 cm (two to four inches). But Striefler says the company is working to extend that. 'We hope to increase the power of the chip to improve its read range.'
Looks like a bold new frontier for interacting creatively with corporate computer systems.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Now how am I supposed to keep track of all my wives?
Oh right, not when it's your information, only when it's a record label's information.
Can you really believe this since this is the very same state that wanted to send information about every citizen in the state to a company in Florida called Matrix. See http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,590041052,00 .html
Starting from this, building a RFID reader detector should be easy -- know when someone is scanning for tags. After that, if some reader is looking for tags with data, why not give the poor thing some? LOUDLY. Reading the data off of some existing tags should give you an idea of what format data the reader is looking for, especially if they use any CRCs or such to stop someone from feeding the reader arbitrary data. Then feed them arbitrary data. The best part is that you really aren't transmitting with passive RFID, you're just "echoing" the reader's transmission.
The gizmo used in the project is an Atmel e5551. Google for that and you'll find lots of things to read.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
As a Mormon in Utah, it is frustrating that so much attention is given to the "bad karma", and so little attention is paid to the great things about Utah.
Polygamy is practiced by groups in many states, but Utah gets all of the focus because of the concentration in certain communities (half in Utah, half across the border in Arizona). Additionally, most of that is attributed to the "Mormon church", which hasn't practiced polygamy since it became a state about 120 years ago (at which time it joined the U.S. and polygamy became illegal in Utah. Before that Utah was not in the United States, and polygamy was perfectly legal). So to even associate modern polygamy with the LDS church would be like calling anyone who currently lived in the southern states racist because their states used to practice slavery.
SCO is ~in~ Utah, but in no way reflects the views of Utah or Utahns. I don't hear anyone bagging on California or Virginia because Verisign is there, or Washington state because Microsoft is there.
Utah is a great state with great people, a lot of great companies, incredibly beautiful natural resources that we take very good care of (8 or 9 National Parks, I think more than any other state, and certainly more geologically diverse), and a lot of other things going for it.
To "feel immediate antagonism" toward Utah over a few issues that are really quite unrelated to the state is just a narrow-minded, uneducated, knee-jerk reaction.
RFID is a red herring. It's needed now simply because our computer technology can't understand what's going on around it without a little help. As soon as computers can understand what they're seeing through a video camera, they'll just *look* at you and your basket and gather the same information. Are we going to ban video cameras in order to protect our privacy?
Instead of arguing about whatever particular technologies happen to be available now, let's jump forward to the final argument. Unless you're inside your house, or some other friendly enclosure, you will be observable - and how can we really complain about anyone just *noticing* what they see and recording information about it, regardless of what their purposes are? I'm not really sure where this question will eventually lead but, in the end, it's the truly relevant question.