Archive for March, 2004

Senator Leahy, on “Micro-monitoring” and RFID

Tuesday, March 30th, 2004

Senator Patrick Leahy, speaking at Georgetown Law School, comments on his concerns that we’re entering an era of “micro-monitoring,” in which RFID will play a large part: http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200403/032304.html

“…These all raise exciting possibilities, but they also raise potentially troubling tangents. While it may be a good idea for a retailer to use RFID chips to manage its inventory, we would not want a retailer to put those tags on goods for sale without consumers’ knowledge, without knowing how to deactivate them, and without knowing what information will be collected and how it will be used. While we might want the Pentagon to be able to manage its supplies with RFID tags, we would not want an al Qaeda operative to find out about our resources by simply using a hidden RFID scanner in a war situation.”

“The RFID Privacy Scare Is Overblown”

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

Commentary in Computerworld by Jay Cline, entitled, “The RFID Privacy Scare Is Overblown” (though looks to be largely lifted from a previous opinion piece by him last November?).

He advocates that the industry spent more time educating the public, which seems like a reasonable suggestion. Though the army of straw men he sets up (“It’s infeasible today for someone driving a vehicle down your street to intercept signals from RFID-tagged goods inside your home”) don’t actually address the potential of RFID to be erosive of privacy.

RFID readers on cell phones

Monday, March 22nd, 2004

While it’s a bit early to call it a “killer app,” Nokia has produced an RFID-enabled GSM phone, debuting at the CeBIT Fair: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/834/1/1/

If there’re some aspects of “chicken and egg” to RFID: absent readers, tagging doesn’t make sense… absent enough tags to read, who needs readers?, this might help to catalyze things. NB that the read range is extremely short–on the order of a few centimeters–but keep in mind that the tags it can read (13.56 MHz tags, e.g., such as are found in library book tracking applications, etc.) can be read from greater distances by more capable readers.