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:Just put them in your microwave

[LiquidCoooled]

The only problem I see here is that not everything is microwave safe.

How do oyu microwave your brand new microwave?

What happens when your steel toe capped boots go in there?

Will the fabric on your GFs dress screw up if you you zap it?

Will the DVD you just bought be playable or writable?

thats just a few thoughts, but microwaving should be safe... YMMV

Patent War Chest

[Anonymous Coward]

The Good News:
1) BellSouth is a huge company that can't figure out what to do about PTSN loses, much less how to deploy RFID scanners.
2) This is just a patent to be added to their war chest. Every large company is likely to be sued, so they need methods to fight back. Patents are often the most cost effective manner, since getting them is cheaper than mounting any defense against of a real lawsuit.

You don't have to be paranoid - but it helps

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Already the scenes from 2002s movie Minority Report, where your retinas are scanned and "personalised" advertising is beamed at you, seems quaint. Now we know you'll be RFID scanned, and up-sold on the shoes you're wearing, as the brand, size and age of your shoes will be instantly known. And cash won't help, because RFID chips will be in that too.

Generally, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean really. Right now, anyone can go through my garbage and recyclabes and see:

- what my spending habits are like (empty product boxes along with the other trash)
- what my diet is like
- what my consumption rate is
- what my interests are (above mentioned product boxes, tossed junk mail, etc)
- what my personal timeline is like (how much trash is developed at various times)
- samples of my dna (various personal care item cast offs, hair, finger nails, etc)
- samples of my finger prints

and lord knows what else. Really, all we're really talking about here for the average person is that they can do several of the above without getting really messy and stinky.

Need a portable tag shredder

[smchris]

Don't leave that empty pack of smokes at the bar. They'll show up at the crime scene later.

Re:Just put them in your microwave

[advocate_one]

(Or just use cash).

and when the notes have RFID chips in them???

DMCA voilation??

[doublem]

Since RFID tags are so useful to corporations, I see any "RFID Killer" being classified as illegal as soon as it hiss the market.

After all, it could be used to steal items from a store, or interfere with the RFID chips that people DON'T want deactivated!!!

It'll be classified as a burglary tool or something worse in short order, if there aren't aspects of such a devise that aren't already illegal.

Chilling effect

[badfish99]

From TFA:
His organization has a code of ethics ... So how about putting these principles into law? ... any regulation "would have a chilling effect that would put us back years"

In other words, the RFID maker claims to have a code of ethics, but doesn't want to be held to that code.
That smells to me like his code of ethics is going straight out of the window the instant it suits him.

Some things you might want to keep private.

[twitter]

What's so bad about studying them[shopping patterns]?

Here's a short list of things that you might not want everyone knowing:

1. Your drinking habits.
2. Your method of birth control.
3. Medications especially for things like anti-depressants or treatments for STDs.
4. The books you read.

All of these things can be used against you by your employer or insurance company.

You only think you want targeted ads. Imagine your wife getting ads for the wrong brand of tampon at just the right time. That's how invasive and awful your phone company's snooping can be. The grocery store comes close right now. The targeting works as intended and is as annoying as hell because the stupid coupons are always for the wrong brand.

Finally, ask yourself what snooping through your garbage has to do with phone service. Is this why federal, state and local laws protect incumbent phone providers from competition? BellSouth, thank you for a new low.

Re:Some things you might want to keep private.

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post is right on. 20 years ago, political operatives wanted SC nominee Robert Bork's video rental records. 10 years ago, everybody wanted to know who didn't pay tax on their nanny's salary. Last month, the New York Times wanted SC nominee Roberts' children's adoption records, just in case the children might have been illegally offered to him and thus be a sensational story. The threshold of who is snooping continues to move downward; the pool of who might incidentally want that information and have the means to get it continues to increase; and the threshold of privacy they want to invade continues to move inward. And it won't respectfully stop when it reaches your comfort level.

In the near future, your neighbor, the blogger, might just decide you need to be put in your place by posting what his Acme RFID-Max SuperScanner can find next time you're away. And the Internet Wayback machine and Google may ensure that it is never difficult to retrieve or forgotten.

The best way to secure sensitive data is to NOT enable its collection in the first place. Unless you actually want a society where everyone is afraid to deviate from the community's blandest common denominator.

Re:Some things you might want to keep private.

[Generic Guy]

As I said before, if this info is publicized or shared, it's a completely other problem and I do believe it shouldn't be shared.

And no, I wouldn't mind the store I shop from knowing my drinking habits. I have nothing to hide, I'm no alcoholic, if they see I indeed prefer a brand of beer over any cider, big deal?

There was recently a case in my state where a fellow slipped and fell in a store and ended up needing to sue for medical treatment. It seemed like a pretty clear-cut case, but the store was trying to weasel out of responsibility and decided to pull up his "customer loyalty card" info and tried to use a defense implying that the guy was a drunkard based upon his alcohol purchases -- on the public record in court! Anyway, it didn't save their case and the guy won. And as I recall, he bought a lot for hosted parties and the like, and didn't drink much of it himself but irregardless he should never have been put in a position to defned his purchases let alone even needing to explain himself.

Anyway, it was the first time I actually saw the media show concern about all this personal data collection. And that was just with a store card. I stopped using all my store loyalty cards after that expose. RFID seems more insidious if anyone (think: lawyers) can scan your car, house, or trash trying to establish patterns for whatever reason. The old 'I have nothing to hide' argument doesn't mean we should allow any of this, because it will be abused. No one should have to actively think or worry about how their shopping purchases might look to uninvolved RFID observers after the fact, especially when it can be so easily twisted against you.

Re:Just put them in your microwave

[BVis]

Here in America...they've tried several times to come out with a dollar coin, only to have it fail time and again. Even when they try to change the color of the dollar coin so it's not confused with a quarter, people still balk at it. People want their paper money here.

The attempts at dollar coins have failed in the US because of several reasons:

• Non-removal of one dollar bills from circulation (at the bank level)
  
• Poor design of the coins themselves (too easily mistaken for a quarter, etc). This could be fixed by following the model of the UK one pound coin: it's about the same size as a US nickel but twice as thick, much easier to recognize in your pocket and in the cash drawer. Unfortunately this leads to:
  
• Resistance from the vending machine industry (machines would need to be retooled to accept a coin significantly different from the ones currently in use)
  
• The perception by the great unwashed that coins aren't "real money", lack of education about the new currency (think of the oft-repeated Taco Bell two dollar bill story); this goes hand in hand with Americans' fanatical opposition to being educated.
  

It's just another case of Americans' short-sightedness, where the fact that some inconvenience in the short term would lead to significant benefits in the long term (in this case, lowered US currency production expenses, in non-trivial amounts) is completely irrelevant, and stating otherwise supports terrorism | Communism | Socialism | the Liberals | the hippies | $randomUnAmericanGroup.

Re:Paranoia is egotism

[lmlloyd]

You would be surprised who would care. Many businesses ask for permission to run a credit report on applicants before hiring them. They will then pay a fair amount of money to get a fairly detailed report that tells them a lot more about you than you might be comfortable with them knowing. By the same token, once they have that permission, they never need to ask for it again. Performance at work dropping off? Let's run another detailed report and see what's going on in his life outside of work, before we decide how to approach this. I have even known (particularly unpleasant) women who would run a detailed credit report on a guy before deciding if they wanted to get serious with him! I also know several people who rent properties they own, and you would be amazed at the detail they can (and do) get before deciding if they want to rent you a house. I have a friend who lived at my apartment for quite some time, simply because a good job, plenty of money, and a clean-cut appearance wasn't enough to get him over some irregularities on his credit report. He couldn't rent an apartment in any decent part of town, he couldn't buy a house, he couldn't stay in a hotel (no credit card for them to hold). He was a grown man forced for years to live with friends, simply because of his credit report. If that isn't ruining someone's life, then I don't know what is. Sure, if you own a house in the suburbs, never plan on moving, have a stable job, and plenty of money in the bank, I suppose you can be cavalier about how everyone is being paranoid. But if your life is at all out of the norm, then the amount of information being tracked about up can actually cause some very real problems in a society that is evermore leaning towards treating a credit score as an indication of how good a person you are.

Re:Calm Down: You're Being Paranoid

[foreverdisillusioned]

Oh look, an Anonymous Coward who has absolutely no concept of statistics. Modded up to +3 too. Impressive and/or sad.

RFID on EVERYTHING means that anomalies like that become less and less significant. Cross-reference enough data and you can spot patterns without having the faintest idea why they're there. (There's actually a famous psychiatric test based on this principle, though the name escapes me. Basically, it's a bunch of crazyass questions designed to give the shrink a statistical probability that you're suffering from a mental disease. The individual answers themselves are irrelevant; only the statistical whole counts. Thus, the potential for an individual to purposefully alter his answers is in effect built into the final percentages--there's really no way to cheat.)

You've missed the point completely. How often do you send shoes to someone living 3,000 miles away? Do you think Nike or Reebok care about the handful of people who've done such a thing? Marketing people only care about the fat, juicy center of the bell curve. Yeah, there are also those niche markets at the edges, but the instant you change your focus to that niche, then it becomes the center of the bell curve.

On the whole this isn't all terribly evil so long as it's used for relatively non-obnoxious advertisements, but the potential for abuse by insurance agencies, banks, law enforcement, etc. is very, very high. If you're not in the statistical norm for the targeted advertisement, who cares? You ignore the ad. But if you're far out of the statistical norm for "law abiding citizen" and the local PD finds out, you can bet your ass you'll be hounded until the day you die (or move to a saner country.) It won't matter if you're an exception; it won't matter if there's only a 55% chance you're a criminal. They'll do it because it's efficient. It'll be like racial profiling except it will apply to every single minority conceivable, from Yanni fans to gays to diehard otakus to atheists. Your difficultly in the world will be inversely related to your conformity. Stray too far out of the norm and your insurance rates will skyrocket, you credit rating will plunge, and cops will look at you that much harder next time they've got an unsolved crime on their hands.

It's not bizzare; it's not even inherently evil. Living by statistics is just an efficient way of doing things. The problem is that greater efficiency is bought with something far more precious; individuality. For now, I can ignore the ads, but for heaven's sake let's not get complacent.