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Your Garbage Can Could Be Spying On You
macs4all writes "Garbage cans all over England are under surveillance tonight. And not by sleepy, fallible humans. This article in Live Science claims that at least 500,000 'wheelie bins' are now using RFID technology." Though that doesn't sound very dire, the article points out the ease with which your consumer spending habits could be tracked. "Although this is frankly a story that is difficult to take seriously, please note the following. You should remember that many of the articles you buy (and sooner or later throw away) are now also equipped with passive RFID tags that detail the item's brand name and product name. If it's possible to scan the tag on the trash can with an ID, it's possible to use similar equipment to quickly scan your can to uncover your purchasing habits."
Why would you care about getting back the same garbage can? As long as they're all the same size, who cares? All they do is hold your garbage so no matter which one you get, they're all dirty.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
Without RFID tags on the bins, someone could still walk by with a scanner and scan your trash to see what you've been buying... The only difference is that having a tag on the bin makes keeping track of who's trash it is marginally easier, but it's not impossible without them... I'm afraid that we're going to see many articles like this in the future, as people slowly discover RFID tags in things that didn't used to have them... RFID readers on garbage trucks... they can see what I'm buying! Wait... they could already see what i have been buying with my credit card... Unless i purposefully try to obfuscate my purchases of certain items with cash, chances are my arbitrary use of cash versus credit gives everyone who has access to that data a good picture of what i buy... Yes, there are new scenarios rfid tags create, but it's all the same idea. The point is things are changing... Marketing has been getting more invasive ever since it started, but we live out lives just fine today. Tomorrow, if i get a target ad on goldfish crackers because someone finds out i ate some goldfish crackers via the wheelie bin, it's not going to change my life... And yes, it could be used by bad people, but my point again is everything is like that... So lets relax a bit... -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I wouldn't underestimate how petty people who hate their neighbours can be. Not much use applying rational logic to their actions.
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Think: broken/missing lids, hinges, handles, wheels; the can having been run into/over by a car; or the can being stolen. (If your neighbor's can is stolen, and he takes yours, it's not like you can use his.)
You have just managed to disguise the cardboard boxes as they stand outside for cardboard recycling, and now comes along another tool for burglars to see if your place is really worth raiding (note to burglars: it isn't, and my pitbull is underfed).
Why the hell don't these idiots think this through before they do this? Then again, you could say that for the whole War on Terror thing - it's certainly made the world a hell of a lot less safe..
> If it's empty, I don't pay.
This wouldn't work in the UK. If the councils start charging people more for throwing away too much garbage then people will start dumping their stuff in their neighbours bins to avoid getting charged. We already have enough problems with fly tipping of commercial and hazardous waste as it is, without adding residential waste to the mix.
-Vern
That's fine, but it's not how it'd work in the UK. They'll come up with a trash tax which will probably add more than 100 GBP to our council tax which often exceeds 1000 GBP a year as it is. Meanwhile they only collect the rubbish every two weeks and refuse (no pun int...) to take it if you've overfilled the bin or not sorted the recycling how they want it. Of course, they don't actually recycle 90% of the stuff you'd expect... no newspapers, magazines, cardboard food packaging, plastic, etc...
Rip off Britain's a bleeding con and it's no wonder 0.5 million of us are emigrating each year.
So take them off and pop them in the microwave, then replace them. Dire warnings aside, the workload on modern refuse collectors is so high that it's vanishingly unlikely that the system will be set up scan and refuse bins without an RFID before emptying them, and it's a fair bet that the beaurocracy won't be set up effectively to investigate who owns which anonymous bin. Do you see the chap on the bin lorry giving a damn? He just wants to get done as soon as possible.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"I'm quite happy for the local council to look into charging a tax for people who can't be bothered to do so."
Seems to me a better solution would be to pay enough money for recyclables that most people would do it voluntarily. Oh I forgot, no commercial enterprise is willing to pay for recyclables because the profit margins are insignificant (ie; it costs almost as much, and sometimes more, to reuse recyclables as it does to use raw materials). But then again it isn't about saving money, or even saving the "environment" after all is it? It's about training the populace to obey government orders.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
"UK is a small crowded place, that's running out of landfill sites rapidly."
Only about 8% of British land is built on, and there are vast areas that could be used for landfills.
Instead, we end up with piles of 'recyclables' that no-one wants, and have to pay to ship them to the Third World so they'll dump them for us. Recycling in the UK is a huge scam, and this is just another way for councils to charge more for doing less.
Your garden is not built on. Would you like a landfill site there?
(a) Landfills have to be kept carefully away from other areas due to pollution and other concerns, so they have a much greater footprint than space they occupy themselves.
(b) Landfills have to be located reasonably near where the garbage is produced. They have to be geographically stable areas. And so on. Many of the places not built on are places that are not built on for a reason, and should not be landfill sites for the same reason.
(c) Just because land is not built on does not mean that nobody cares about what goes on it. If YOU aren't happy to have a landfill near your home or place of work, what right do you have to ask Farmer Bob, or Park Manager Sue, or whatever to have a landfill anywhere near them?
>Would you react the same way if they just write your name on your wheelie bin? I don't really see the difference.
Oh, I see a BIG difference. If they have a scanner on the trucks that can read RFID, they can read not only the tag on the bin, but also all the tags on the trash IN the bin. And it can happen VERY quickly. Furthermore, the huge majority of people won't know they were doing it, or what dangers that implies.
Stencils don't allow our local governments to send a £700k computer systems contract to a councillor's brother in law.
"Parents with young children (how exactly do you recycle a nappy/diaper?)"
You *wash* them, like generations of people used to do, or you hire a diaper service.
People are *way* too attached to disposable... well, everything, to the point that people have forgotten or can't imagine any other way, even though only 1 or 2 generations ago, people wouldn't think of being so wasteful.
Huge piles of garbage from each urban household are a modern anomaly, and a really bad habit that is possible to reduce. In my family household, we are lucky to fill *one* bag of garbage every two weeks. The rest is green-bin organic waste (food, grass clippings, leaves, etc.) or recylables (glass, aluminum, steel cans, about half the plastic). If local municipalities want to reduce the amount of garbage that goes into landfills or other solutions, then they need to provide the services that allow people to exercise other options (such as diversion and pickup of organic waste and recyclables).
You scare me. Are you one of the filthy bastids who walks down the street dropping rubbish as you walk, goes on picnics and leaves crap everywhere, because it's not your back yard so you don't care? Mate, just because there is space to dump stuff, it doesn't mean it makes the place a whole lot nicer if you do. I'd prefer I could go for a walk in the countryside rather than walk between landfill sites in ten years time and not suffer because losers demand it's a human right to consume and throw huge amounts of crap.
A good place to start would be to educate people to use less packaging, to re-use what they've got, make sure stuff is packaged in biodegradable packing so what's thrown breaks down. Persuade people to purchase stuff that lasts longer, persuade the manufacturers not to build stuff that is designed to fall apart. Lots of issues I know but we're going to be neck deep in crap if don't start somewhere.
There's more of us, we consume more. Recycling isn't a scam per se, maybe the current implementation is flawed, I completely agree too much gets shipped off so some poor bastids get a dollar a day cooking circuit boards over open fires and chucking the rest in their drinking / washing water streams... how are we going to stop this stuipidity?