Surpriv: RFID Surveillance and Privacy

Telecoms Korea reports that the South Korean government, through its Ministry of Information Communication, is working on guidelines for RFID privacy protection:

The guidelines ban storing personal information on RFID tag against related laws or without clear statement of consent from the person in question. Furthermore, RFID-tagged products should be indicated with proper mark accompanied by methods of removing the tag. To install a RFID reader, you have to inform shoppers or customers of the fact.

Implanting RFID tags in human body or attaching them to any goods without users’ notice is prohibited, unless otherwise stated by specific provisions of the law.

Such guidelines all but obviate the use of RFID as an anti-theft measure in consumer retail, one would think, but do address the primary consumer privacy concerns.

According to RFID Journal, California State Senator Simitian’s bill, banning the use of RFID in state, county or municipal identification cards, has been passed in the Senate, and awaits consideration in the Assembly.

If passed into law, the act would prohibit California state-, county- or municipality-issued ID cards from containing radio frequency identification (or any contactless integrated circuit). Tollway transponders would be exempt from the law, as would RFID devices used to track inmates and patients in mental institutions and children in hospitals operated by the state or by a county or municipal government. Senator Simitian says further exceptions or changes might be made to the bill as it moves through the assembly, but he is happy about its movement through the state senate.

“I was pleased by the bipartisan support for the bill,” says Senator Simitian, who explains that the bill is intended to address the privacy, personal safety and financial security of individuals. He adds that the vote incited a lot of good discussion on the senate floor, showing “a general acknowledgement about the issues to be addressed. While it is clear that RFID is an extraordinary utility, there are places were its use is not appropriate, and one of those places is in government IDs.”

From Softpedia, some speculative scenarios on RFID & marketing, with some basic RFID background.

RFID Gazette addresses privacy issues, in a summary with a number of useful links (including to this blog… thanks!).

More comments on use of RFID to monitor kids in school, from Wired Magazine readers…

…The ID tag in itself hurts nobody, but the psychological ramifications of being stamped with a number as a child is a scarring experience for the developing mind. It stunts the growth of individuality, gives the child no sense of privacy, and would have me feel lost in a sea of lanyards, tracking devices and numbers. Our children are individuals and the future of our society, and as such, they need to feel like more than a number on someone’s economical little school data server…

Reminding me a little of an argument against Internet voting, as well, that certain physical rituals, such as class roll call (“Buehler? Buehler?…”) aren’t just recording a tally, but are something of a social exercise.

…the designated “tagger” would be the student who careers in all the tags and his friends can be a few minutes late and the system wouldn’t be able to tell. Because we eventually become dependent on our technology and forget to count assuming the computer is right. Always happens and always will happen that way.

(“Careers” presumably meaning “collects and brings in”… certainly one would expect to see clever students hack RFID systems just like they’ve hacked everything back to the dawn of blackboard & chalk…)

Continued coverage on tagging California school kids.

Angry parents, saying their children’s privacy rights are being violated, have asked the board of the tiny Brittan School District to rescind a requirement that all students wear badges that monitor their whereabouts on campus using radio signals.

Interesting developments, though it’s hard to know how much of this little experiment might translate to “people tagging” more generally. Given the small size and isolated location of the school, it’s not all that likely that these tags (and they’re huge) will see much use outside of their primary purpose, e.g., local merchants won’t put up readers to detect school kids (perhaps a stretch, but in downtown Berkeley, where a huge highschool is a block away from the business district, the local retailers have a lot of problems managing kid traffic and “five-finger discounts,” and it’s common to see signs indicating that “No more than X minors allowed in store at one time”…).

The Wall Street Journal covers “video mining,” i.e., deriving actionable intelligence for customer relations management and market research from surveillance camera automated imagery analysis:

Using proprietary software to gauge the size of the images of
people, a ShopperTrak computer determined that Ms. Munro was
an adult, not a child, and thus a bona fide shopper. Weeding
out youngsters is critical in accurately calculating one of
the valuable bits of data ShopperTrak sells — the percentage
of shoppers that buys and the percentage that only browses. It
arrives at this data, including the so-called conversion rate,
by comparing the number of people taped entering the store
with the number of transactions.

Ms. Munro’s visit was tallied up twice: once as a visitor to
the Gap and once in a national count of shoppers. Gap Inc., of
San Francisco, pays ShopperTrak for the tally of Gap shoppers.
ShopperTrak sells the broader data — gleaned from 130 retail
clients and 380 malls — to economists, bankers and retailers.

(Previously noted here as well.)

Germans decorating cakes to protest RFID… what else?

ORBCOMM and VeriChip announce plans to collaborate:

ORBCOMM, a global satellite telecommunications company, today announced that it has executed an agreement with VeriChip(TM) Corporation, a subsidiary of Applied Digital (NASDAQ:ADSX), to be its provider of satellite and telecommunication services for applications to be developed for use with the world’s first implantable radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip, also called VeriChip(TM).

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will also work together to develop and market new military, security, and healthcare applications for use in the United States and around the world.

ORBCOMM would presumably provide the infrastructure to haul VeriChip-derived signals around the world… systems and applications detecting subdermal VeriChips using ORBCOMM low-earth-orbital satellite networks to route collected data back into other systems, and presumably not boosting VeriChips to the point that they’re detectable from space! (“You won’t feel the implant, but its signalling will give you thermal tattoos…”