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Social Consequences and Effects of RFID Implants?
kramdam asks: "Even with all the talk about privacy and security, there seems to be a growing community of people who are implanting themselves with RFID chips. Being a developer myself, I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation. I'm seriously considering jumping into this head first, being on the bleeding edge, and going with an implant. I have looked at resources like Mikey Sklar's site, and Amal Graafstra's site, since they are two pioneers on this subject. For research, I have started TaggedLife to document my own journey. I was wondering what the Slashdot community think about this. What do you think are the social, security, privacy, and health risks associated with this? What are the pluses? Would you do it?"
How about skipping the implant and using the keys like normal human beings. Oh I get it, CNN doesn't interview normal human beings. No way I'm pulling the chip out of my BMW key and implanting it into my body because I want to get into my car 0.001 second faster. /no tattoos or piercings, either
I certainly won't even consider it. Nazi Germany comes to mind, marking folks for reasons of ID'ing them for whatever reason is not a good idea. SS is another thing that creeps me out, a system of identification, now illegally used all the time to limit people's freedoms. Business all the time limit doing business with someone if they don't provide a SS, yet that is illegal. When will it come down to the same with a RFID? I suspect sooner than later, especially if the government gets involved in the process, and it already has... FDA anyone?
You could just carry the tag. Or wear it. Would that be too hard?
- Pluses
* You're in a car accident or you collapse and you have to go to the hospital and they need a medical history.* You're child is lost and they need to find his address/phone number (this sounds incredibally pet like, I know. But the kid should be allowd to have it turned off/removed @ age 18 or younger if parents consent)
- Minuses
* Let's say someone finds a way to sniff the signal, and can open your car/house what have you* You want to take a job in the covert business..
* Anyone can track you
* If this takes off and business impliment it and you don't want to do it then you can't buy goods and what not. I personally would never do this. It's just wrong in sooo many ways, religiously and ethically.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
There are no real advantages to such a scheme and plenty of disadvantages. For example:
Indeed, for me---and apologies in advance for my language---I believe the answer is not so much "no", but rather, "hell fucking no."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You did say nothing, right?
I am however worried about ubiquitous tracking. How can that possible be good? Britain for example wants to track EVERY car on the roads and then store the data for 2 years.
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"Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years."
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/articl
Don't they make the kiddes read 1984 anymore? How much more blatant do things have to get before there is some sort of real effective reaction?
Oh I forgot it's for the children, and against the terrorists and pirates, nevermind.
When I read stuff like this, off the grid survivalist/back to the land hippies don't sound tin foil hat crazy, they sound like smart forerunners of an underground resistance to tyranny.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You mean like to your home? How is this secure? I mean, truely, how? What your RFID only will respond to certain readers? Someone won't be able to have a portable reader connected to say a laptop that reads your RFID and uses that to program the correct response code to other readers?
...unlock my car...
I take it you didn't read the LA Times lately. For reference, go read this article and when you are done, do you REALLY think they won't be able to do something similar? In fact it will be even easier, they just watch a place that gets a lot of expensive cars, place a few RFID readers around, wait for you to leave and then walk up to your car and drive away. They wouldn't even need to spend several minutes "cracking" your car's code since they got it from you when you drove into the lot.
...log me on to my computer...
Get a fingerprint reader, or a smart card reader. Heck Sun has an entire system based on this for years, it will even move your active session from computer to computer (i.e. the applications you have open and running, your connections to other computers, the mozilla window on slashdot, the code you have compiling, etc...)
...control home automation...
Wow, you need to have a RFID "implanted" to do this? Why not a card or a chip, or widget that fits in your wallet? Why not that for ANY of the above? All you do with the implant is tag yourself for everyone else to see and track. A card/chip/widget can be easily changed. Same reason why you need to change passwords ever few weeks, it make it harder for someone to compromise and continue compromising your security.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Last I saw, you could get these the size of a grain of rice. Why not just pierce your ear and stick it in the hole, or superglue it to your fingernail (which you'd have to redo periodically)
Here's a reason no one thought of for these... If there's any ferrous metal in the device, you cannot go into an MRI machine. Additionally, even though there may not be ferrous metal in it, the MRI can still cause inductive heating on the device which can burn you. This is fine, when you're coherent enough to tell the docs what you have. What happens if you are in a car accident or have a stroke, and they need to stick you in an MRI machine?
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Obviously, you have no sense of how quickly technology becomes obsolete.
Otherwise, you wouldn't want to implant that technology into you.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
\i{We have no idea what the long-term impact of these devices inside the human body could be.}
Actually, we kind of do. This technology has been used on animals for years.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I typically wear pants everywhere I go, and the places I don't wear pants, I don't think I need to be uniquely identified...or at least, I think I'm pretty well recognized just by my physiognomy, yuh?
So, please, instead of putting the proprietary and easily-obsolesced technological bolus UNDER MY GOD-DAMNED SKIN can I, yuh, just stick it in my pocket?
That'd be brilliant. Cheers.
Good news, It's a suppository!
You can't get an MRI once you've been tagged, so the nipple ring would be an improvement in the case you want a MRI for some critical thing instead of it having to be cut out of your arm.
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
You *already* need to take yourself apart to foil biometric ID.
Well the last time I had imprints/samples of any body-bits taken without my will or knowledge was, oh, never. Nobody hiding in an alley that I'm passing by is getting a good picture of my retina to forge. I don't believe any strangers I may have shook hands with were surreptitiously taking my fingerprints either. With an embedded RFID tag, you could be being positively identified at any time with a very minimal risk of the snooper being detected by you. With remote access, everything is right there for anyone with the right kind of snooping equipment. That's why they had to shield the covers of those RFID passports they came out with, so I guess one would have to put the thing in their wrist and then wear a shielded glove or wristband all the time to protect their privacy. Kind of defeats the purpose of the convenience, if one is at all privacy-minded.
First off, they'd need to cut off an ARM; they're usually placed in your bicep.
Finally, no one in their right minds would ever take this approach. It's just not efficient enough. Identity theft works best in VOLUME.
So at that point, you need to start seeing things in a "scarier" light.
Remember how in movies it only takes an expert thief bumpin into you at the shoulder to take your wallet? Now they can grab a whole lot more with a wireless scanner.
RFID devices outright GIVE OUT their information. That's all they know how to do. There's no two-way communication. Their basic approach is to announce information given what little power they were provided with in the original radio signal.
Just how hard would it be to scan and spoof RFID given the right equipment?
\i{We have no idea what the long-term impact of these devices inside the human body could be.}
Actually, we kind of do. This technology has been used on animals for years.
Only on animals that have a typical lifespan of 10 years though.
Which I imagine to be _extremely_ painfull when torn from the nipple by a thief
Then again, some people may get off on that.
However, I'd stick with a watch/bracelet
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There are no real advantages to such a scheme and plenty of disadvantages
Exactly. For some reason most people here seem to forget the most important thing:
RFID has nothing to do with encryption/security. It's a serial number. What fucking good is that going to do you? So your car will start when your serial number is near? It should be pretty clear that faking a serial number is trivial. With RFIDs you don't even need physical contact to achieve that.
In other words:
I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation
will not be solved by RFID. I don't even understand where someone would get that idea. You'd be crazy to rely on that. If you think that doing security through positive identification of a certain physical human being present is a good idea (which is debatable to begin with), then you're probably better off doing fingerprint or iris-scanning.
Now if RFID tags had RSA or something built in, it would be a different story. But they don't.
Eh, this whole story makes no sense at all.