What's Wrong with RFID Tags?
Tracking Everything, Everywhere, All The Time
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There are so many obvious advantages to RFID tags and the ability to track items no matter where they go on the planet, it may at first seem perverse to challenge them - but only at first. It shouldn't take more than a few moments thought to realize that RFID tags also pose tremendous problems for consumer privacy, personal privacy, and the way we like to live today.
To put it simply: Retailers and manufacturers don't want RFID tags merely to make it easier for them to keep track of where their products are - they also want them to make it easier to keep track of where their products go. What that means is they hope that RFID will help them keep track of you - what you buy, what you don't buy, where you shop, and everything else that they can possibly get their hands on in an effort to get you to buy more and more of their stuff.
Their efforts to trade convenience and savings in exchange for information about you can be seen in the widespread use of store savings cards. Do you have a special member card, something most often offered at grocery stores, that gives you extra savings on the things you buy? Stores aren't giving you those savings as a gift or as a reward for frequent shopping. They are paying you for something they want: information about your buying habits. The more you use that card, the more they learn - and you'd be surprised at how quickly a very accurate personal and consumer profile can be constructed based upon that data.
RFID tags take this forward to an extreme degree. No longer will information your purchasing habits be limited to just the store you are in and whomever that store sold its database to; with RFID, every time you walk into a store they will know everything about what you are wearing, what is in the car you are driving, and everything you have ever purchased there.
With centralized databases about consumer purchasing habits, they'll be able to check everything that you've ever bought and everything you still currently own. Everything you have ever purchased will be numbered, identified, tracked, and cataloged in your own database entry. Do you think that private companies deserve to have that much information about you? It's not like you'll be able to remove or turn off the tags, so what choice will you have?
The government, too, can make a lot of use of these tags. The scanning of cars and homes from the outside could help reveal all sorts of authorized and/or illegal products - and there is every chance that such "searches" might be upheld in the courts as legal. While such searches might turn up criminals and terrorists, do we really want the police to have the power to do this?
The government will also have the power to track our movements. Scanners could be set up around a city or community just as surveillance cameras are currently being installed. Connected to powerful computers, these scanners will be able to keep track of the movement of any collection of RFID tags (i.e., the collection you have on your body in clothing, jewelry, items, and money). Wherever you go, you could be watched.
Did I mention money? Yes, it will be possible to put these into all bank notes. The European Central Bank is researching how best to embed RFID tags in the fibers of the Euro, hopefully no later than 2005. This won't just allow for the tracking of whomever is carrying the notes - governments will be able to record the transaction history of every single note as well. Every time it is used to purchase anything, the government will know exactly where and when.
This will make counterfeiting much more difficult because cash registers can be outfitted to reject money that doesn't have the proper ID sequencing. On the other hand, cash is currently the only anonymous way to conduct transactions - but if all cash is tagged, that won't be true anymore. Also, criminals with scanners could learn just how much money you are carrying around with you.
More: Fearing the Future
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