September 29, 2003
Here's the latest feature on radio frequency identification, or RFID. This technology has been getting a lot of press lately, with the new Wal-Mart directive requiring suppliers to adopt it. But the privacy concerns are serious:
"Very few people grasp the enormity of this," said Katherine Albrecht, director of Citizens Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a group that was founded in 1999 to protest the use of frequent shopper cards and credit cards to collect data on individual consumers' purchasing habits.It's especially troubling when you consider that RFID tags can be as small as a grain of sand, meaning they could be implanted in just about any product without the consumer's knowledge. The demand that chips be deactivatable upon sale at the consumer's request seems reasonable enough.Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
The short range on these tags is supposed to prevent abuse of the system. I'm skeptical. Wi-Fi 802.11b, the most widely used protocal for wirelss networks, was originally supposed to broadcast only 100 feet. It's been extended to 310km recently, and I'm sure greater distances will be achieved.
What stops a crook from scanning houses to see who's got the exact component he wants to steal?
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