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.

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.

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.

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: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.