Embedded Microchips In Virtually Everything

Microsoft CRM recommends a long AP article laying out the nightmare scenario of RFID chips in everything tracking not only things but people. The darker possibilities of a technology capable of enabling ubiquitous surveillance are not news to this community, but it's not so common to see them spelled out for a wider audience. "Microchips with antennas embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items and consumers wherever they go. Much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed... [A director at FTI Consulting] said:] 'It's going to be used in unintended ways by third parties — not just the government, but private investigators, marketers, lawyers building a case against you.'"

Comments

Will it be a hard sell or a soft sell?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In light of the obviously undesireable implications of having every detail available to any spook with a scanner, I imagine that we'll start seeing systems designed to detect and neutralize the tags. Given that they are designed to respond to scans they shouldn't be too hard to ferret out(until the RFID equivalent of port knocking comes out, of course). Presumably a variety of little arms races will be kicked off, between the cypherpunks and the feds, the counterfeiters and the corporations, etc.

The more interesting question, though, is what the reaction will look like on a social scale. Will RFID tags be routinely removed at point of sale, the way dye tags are, or will they be aggressively integrated into products in an effort to make them tamperproof? Will people at large see neutralizing RFID tags in items you own as a common, sensible, precaution, like shredding important documents, or will that be seen as the sort of thing that only hackers, criminals, and other shady characters would do?

It will also be interesting to see what sorts of uses the vast amount of ambient information will be put to. Obviously, the usual surveillance and marketing stuff will be pretty thick on the ground; but there might be some rather more curious things as well. I can just imagine the horde of social networking gimmicks that will spring up around the ability to detect the consumer goods carried by those around you. It'll be just like Zune Squirting; but ubiquitous!(Does anybody else miss the days when the future was going to have flying cars and robots?)

Cell Phone = tracking device

[megamerican]

If you own a cell phone and often carry it with you everywhere you go, you can be tracked. You can even be tracked with your phone turned off. The government has been asking to track people even without sufficient probably cause(and probably doing it illegally since we know about it).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201444.html?hpid=topnews

I believe this was mandated in the 1996 Telecommunications Act for all cellular devices and has been implemented long since.