About RFID and privacy

I read the (seemingly not post-filtered and rarely-to-the-point-of thread) reactions of some New Scientist readers on this article on the usage of RFID techniques to track electronic component lifetimes. As also can be seen on this rather innocent usage of industrial RFID-based tracking techniques (the reasons I will try to enumerate in a footnote), people seem to be afraid of the technology RFID because "the government" will "abuse" it to track their lives.

As readers of this blog might know, I'm not singing the "hurray for our almighty elected heroes" song every day, quite the opposite. I believe getting elected these days implies some forced intellectual > /dev/null inadequacy and meaningless, dysfunctional trade-offs anyway. But there lies my argument contra the "government will always abuse us with their RFID X-files stuff" momentum: a democratically elected government ain't the problem, it is a rather visible system where civil organizations control...er. Well, let's say anyway that governments are more open to control on the usage of standards and their lawfulness than international organizations (as far as they haven't become the same thing), shall we.

The technology of RFID consists basically out of passive transponder technology, ages old, miniaturized to a very tiny scale, only recently made possible, that, when activated (powered) by a small EM wave, transmits any data tags possibly imaginable. The issue is only

• in the content of the data tags and
• the awareness of the keeper of the RFID device.

I should say: tag anything you like to tag about an aware and consent ID keeper. If you like to tag cows, then I guess you don't need their consent to tag their

{ID, birthday, nickname, mother_ID, father_ID, average_milk_production, gender, sexual_orientation, er...etc}

. If you tag a PC part, there need be no prob (see below). Tagging Afghans entering JFK International is another pair of Kevlar pants.

This whole thing smells like the questions almost none of these scared people ask themselves about the creepily hundreds of public session cookies (imho a much more interesting "technology" to sweep through someones life) that are squandered around by people not grasping the concept of peer-to-peer networks.

It seems many readers on internet forums express deep feelings of complete powerlessness. They seem to think that "someone else" controls their privacy and even their banking accounts, which by Jove they truly should own completely, of course. The more people get confronted with information (distribution), the more they - correctly - assume abuse.

But in the end, it is to "le citoyen" to define what private and public organizations can and cannot do. In democracies, "le citoyen decide par les elus choisis". If you cannot count on elected institutions to counteract rigorously the unacceptable abuses of tagging anything of anyone, then you might have ended up - without seeing it as such - in some parallel universe of the former Eastern Germany, only with more glitter and lots of commercials (not like the people in the brilliant movie "Das Leben der Anderen", who at least realised the problem.)

Now, I know Americans have become completely paranoid about the people they (don't?) elect, and they probably should, but since RFID is a rather open technology it can also be detected using the same open technology. The moment dust-sized RFID-like devices with no specs whatsoever, using weird data interface protocols and closed encryption, are seemingly sprayed on people passing international borders and detected by weirdly behaving alarm systems in supermarkets, let's talk again, shall we?

For now, I recommend the scared readers of NS: get informed by reading about what we as consumers tolerate (and shouldn't).

Footnote on industrial component tags

Something like:

{fabrication_date, serial_number, revision_index, expected_EOL}

should suffice for a component, no? I wonder if dynamic tags are possible: is the RFID device able to store new information from the device it is attached to? In that case, one could ad:

{Nstartups, Nfailures, Atemp, AVolt, etc}

to the data collection. But surely not

{Nvisits_to_playboy_site, Nattempts_to_visit_site_of_democratic| green| independant_presidential_candidates, Ncredit_card_number, etc}

Or could it? :-)