I worked on several RFID tag projects for the Department Of Defense (DoD) in the early ’90s. Back then we were primarily concerned with asset tracking and enhanced supply chain management. The U.S. Army had shipped thousands of ocean containers to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, but no one knew what was in the containers. RFID tags were the solution to identifying what was in the ocean container without opening the doors of the container. Back then the RF tags we were working with cost hundreds of dollars. Now many RFID tags costs less than a dollar and are expected to cost under a dime in the near future.
With the cost of RFID tags going down businesses and Governments are starting to look at RFID tags to not just track assets, but also track people and their behavior. This is where RFID tags start to infringe on person’s privacy. In Korea, legislators are drafting new guidelines to limit the use of RFID tags when tracking people and their behavior. See posting Freedom Is Slavery » Korea Doing Retail RFID Right.
The privacy concerns in regard RFID tag capabilities are as follows:
- 1) Unique ID that can be tied to an individual
- 2) able to produce in mass quantities to track everything
- 3) Able to determine the location and activities of an individual
- 4) Able to track people without their knowledge
RFID tag capabilities by themselves are not to concerning. What is concerning is when you tie the RF tags to internet technology, computers, and databases. All this tracking can happen real cheap in real-time, analyzed and correlated in real-time, and then produce a desired response to an individual’s behavior. Desired responses for businesses could be a target coupon for dog food generated from your “smart tag” shopping cart when you are in the dog food aisle, or a computer telling you while you are in your bathroom to buy toilet paper when you are near the end of your toilet tissue roll.
RFID tag technology makes things convenient, but is it smart. RFID tag technology enables Governments and businesses to have complete visibility over any person’s daily activities. In the wrong hands RFID technology turns from enabling visibility to enabling absolute power over an individual. I’m reminded of Lord Acton’s quote “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
There are also some possible technical solutions to privacy for RFID tags, such as warning people when they are being tracked, or only allowing authorized scanners to track a RFID tag, or even disabling the RFID tag when it comes in contact with a person. Not sure if any of these solutions will satisfy privacy concerns and be economically feasible.
