Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
e 334686.ece
"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?
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?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
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.
\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.
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.