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Senator Leahy Calls for RFID Technology Hearings
securitas writes "Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has called for congressional hearings into radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The comments were made Mar. 23 to the Georgetown University Law Center's conference on video surveillance technology during a speech titled 'The Dawn of Micro Monitoring: Its Promise, And Its Challenges To Privacy And Security'. Leahy suggested that RFIDs may require federal regulation to ensure the public's privacy rights. Leahy is quoted as saying that the combination of RFIDs, sophisticated databases, networks and the Internet means that, 'We are on the verge of a revolution in micro-monitoring - the capability for the highly detailed, largely automatic, widespread surveillance of our daily lives.' He goes on to say that, 'We need clear communication about the goals, plans, and uses of the technology, so that we can think in advance about the best ways to encourage innovation, while conserving the public's right to privacy.' (Leahy's RFID speech transcript)"
RFID is good technology, with a lot of potential and a number of legitimate uses. Unfortunately it can also put big brother in your pocket, shoes, shirt and pants. If they could do just three key elements in a law I think it could flourish without privacy fears and diminished abuse potential.
/will/ produce them) come about, they would become a neon broadcast flag to theives.
Only allow people to scan for RFID that match a white list of your own property or property in your care with your consent. Any reading not on a white list must be discarded. Once an item is sold it is no longer their property and must be removed from the white list - with todays pos tech this would be absurdly easy to implement. This would allow retailers and distribution centers to use it for their own logistical and loss prevention purposes. This would also keep people minding their own business - literaly.
IF an RFID tag is on an item it should be prominently labeled, and be removable without destruction, devaluation or vandalism to the item that is attached to. For example, someone here asked a bit back, why not just cot off the tag? Answer - some clothing is now comes tagless.
Make sure that warranties and returns do not require RFID tags in order to be upheld. Someone should not be required to keep an RFID tag on something valuable just because they may have to get warranty service on it someday. As more powerful readers (blackmarket
ALL RFID tags MUST be PERMANENTLY disabled BEFORE a purchased article leaves the premises of the place it was purchased.
It would be a simple, one-sentence law that would solve the entire problem. Of course, our government would rather spend a billion dollars in pork barrel research grants in order to come to the same conclusion... I'm sure there's a Vermont think-tank that is pushing Sen. Leahy for this "investigation"
I still haven't figured out what the big deal about "tracking people's purchases" is all about. I really haven't looked into this much, but I understand that the things can't be read from more than 5 feet away. I mean, if the government is within 5ft of my refrigerator monitoring my pizza bites, I think I have much worse problems than being tracked.
I'm intrigued by the discussion surround RFID and retail. Most of the discussions I've seen surround concerns about retailers gathering too much information about their customers' buying habits. The other major concern commonly noted deals with third party tracking of the rfid device once it leaves the store. However, neither of these seem like valid concerns to me.
The ability to track a customer's buying habits, most retailers have that ability now. Bar codes uniquely identify a product. Unless you pay with cash (or a gift card at some retailers), the retailer has access to your name and some corresponding number (checking account or credit/debit card number). Those can easily be stored, RFID is not needed to accomplish this type of information gathering. In fact, many retailers use loyalty programs so that they can track cash and gift card purchases as well as credit/check. All of this begs the question: Is this a bad thing? If more information about your buying habits brings you lower prices, are you willing for your retailer to have that information?
As for tracking the RFID signals once they leave the store, I do not expect this to be a valid concern for long. For a retailer to use rfid on its products for anything other than loss prevention, it needs to be on every product. That means small and cheap, which in turn will drive the manufactures to make them with as low of a signal and as little storage capacity as possible to meet the retailer's needs. And, much like the security tags today, it is a simple thing to disable the tag once it has been scanned/read at the Point of Sale. This would even be preferable, therefore making it easy to scan for tags that are still active trying to make it out of the store (ie, shoplifted items).
All this is not to say there are no privacy concerns here. However, I think too much attention is placed on the retail use of RFID and not enough the other potential uses. Can anyone imagine DL's with embedded RFID? How about the RFID tag in my employee badge? These are the areas that I see real potential for abuse. At a retail store, if you don't want to be tracked, just pay with cash and don't use loyalty. You're data falls into the "other" bucket. If you don't mind being tracked, use your credit card, get your airline miles, your loyalty discount, and save a bucks.
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
I wrote a paper last summer about environmental ethics and technology for a sociology graduate class. Environmental ethics and technology? What could be the connection? Our environment and how is becoming overrun with technology for technologies sake. RFID if a fine example of the slow building of a technological mountain that we will not notice until it is too late. The fact is that technology will enframe most people so that they do not notice it anymore -- MTV generation. For example, who remembers life with only 3-channels of UHF programming, or no condensation-trails from jets in the sky? Now there is a generation that knows only 100+ channels of programming. This will happen with RFID in the next 20-30 years and RFID will be everywhere. A new generation will be born that won't know, or care even if you tell them - generation gap.
Most likely congress will ban RFID readers as a criminal device because people will be worried about criminals reading their homes/cars and corporations will worry about bad data being introduced into there systems, so no personal RFID readers/scramblers/decoders/whatever... -- these will be made illegal due to PRIVACY/BUSINESS concerns.
Overall technology needs a gas tank to keep running: coal/gas to power the PC's; RFID and your stuff in a databse to fuel the MBA's !
Even if RFID is only used on money you will still be tracked. The granularity of tracking is increasing at a scary pace - maybe there is a "moore's law" somewhere in here - so where will it end? Most currency in the world will use RFID and some say that there is a U.S. 20 bill that will be cirulating shortly using RFID - so bill #434566 withdrawn at bank #12 by Joe Smith and bill #434566 used to buy CD ABC at music store XYZ.
Story on NPR today and it does seem that the people representing the privacy side are acting nervous and the business side is confident that they will have their way. And finally there is the relentless tide of consumers who don't give a crap and that is another possible way that RFID will become ubiquitous with a 10% discount coupon attached.
Just some random notes on RFID.