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

Question for those engenieers in the room...

[bogado]

I believe that law alone is not going to stop abusive aplications of this RFID technology. There will be police interest to investigate who passed throw some place where a crime had happend. There will be the marketing department in every major store, that will want to collect information on whitch places on the mega-store you're spending time on. There will be many people intersted in sliping an RFID without your knowlwdge, stalkers, private investigators, police, anti-terrorist people, terrorists, the list is likely to be endless.

So is there a cheappo way to detect this things reliably? How can one be shure that there isn't a NSA designed ship in that shoe you just bought? Ok, maybe a little too paranoid, but if the technology gets to be used every where, there will be time when a user that is worried will forget to disable one or a few of the RFIDs in his cristmas shopping, or maybe auntie tillie did not disable any of theirs, including your present. How can I know that some item of mine is not broadcasting his presence to anyone who happens to know how to activate the chip?