You Need Not Be Paranoid To Fear RFID

An anonymous reader writes "A story at the Boston Globe covers extensive privacy abuses involving RFID." From the article: "Why is this so scary? Because so many of us pay for our purchases with credit or debit cards, which contain our names, addresses, and other sensitive information. Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers." I think they may be going a little overboard with their stance, but it's always interesting to talk about.

Comments

Re:FUD

[Zog The Undeniable]

Er...no. The RFID tag can carry a unique code for every individual item, not the same code for every item of that type (as a barcode does). That means YOUR new shirt has a different code to all those others on the rail.

The 'Necessary and Proper' Cycle

[The Monster]

I see any "RFID Killer" being classified as illegal as soon as it hiss the market.

Well, I don't have quite such a pessimistic outlook.

Ever hear of 'paraphernalia' laws? Tommy Chong went to prison for selling pipes that could be used to smoke marijuana. This is typical of how new laws are often made: A law is passed to criminalize activity based on a correlation to an existing illegal activity as a means to make the latter easier to enforce. After some time passes, the process repeats, with a new class of behavior criminalized to make it easier to enforce the prior law.

Soon we'll see laws against making 'precursors' to 'circumvention devices'; just you watch it happen.