Surpriv: RFID Surveillance and Privacy

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on plans to study amending the tax structures that support highway funding, including shifting from gasoline taxes to taxing miles driven. It might make sense, at one level… the more you drive, the more road you “consume” through wear and tear. But… how to measure that?

High on the list the panel will consider is the per-mile fee that is already the subject of a $1.25 million pilot project in Oregon that will use a special “smart” odometer coupled with a global positioning system in every vehicle, a system invented at Oregon State University.

When the project begins later this year or early next year, every time a volunteer motorist fills up, the odometer’s information will be electronically downloaded and the fee automatically added to the gas purchase price at the pump, just like today’s per-gallon gas taxes. The GPS equipment tells the state when a vehicle has left Oregon, so motorists won’t be charged for those miles. Oregon figures it will charge the volunteers 1.25 cents per mile in taxes.

While one could presumably craft a device that merely spat out “in-state miles driven,” this would have all the hooks required to create the “tell-tale Toyota,” too. While a tax on gasoline is a bit of a crude measure (though it might arguably mean as much to discourage unwarranted gas consumption, as “road consumption”), it feels like the cost of achieving a more accurate tax fit is building in tremendous means for mischief. (Which isn’t to say that GPS won’t likely be a widely-deployed and popular end-user feature in cars, as costs continue to drop and capabilities to improve.)

The Chicago Tribune quotes Paul Saffo on RFID, and relays other speculation on RFID futures:

As more vendors embrace RFID, and volumes ramp up, prices will fall, and technology will improve, [Catalyst International Inc. Vice President Larry] Cinpinski said. He believes vendors will begin incorporating the technology more deeply into their processes starting around 2007.

Eventually, the retail industry expects that all products will have RFID-tagged labels, which will enable customers to gather their goods and walk out of a store without stopping at checkout.

RFID readers will tally the merchandise and charge it to the customer’s account, much as I-PASS users drive past tollbooths without stopping.

The “walk-out check out” meme first hit the small screen with an ad by IBM, “Supermarket,” created by Ogilvy and Mather, in 1999… a rather scruffy guy stalks through the store, stuffing things under his coat… when he exits (and gets scanned, rather laser-like, since RF, uh, doesn’t show up too well on TV!), a security guard intervenes with… “Sir, you forgot your receipt!” (you’d think that if his credit is known, he could be sent a paperless receipt via e-mail?).

But we’ve now presumably got a guy stalking about outside the store, laden with “live” RFID tags… not the best scenario for personal privacy, in the presence of RFID surveillance.

More discussion of using RFID tags on vehicles in Texas, in Computerworld. The advice? “Keep it simple, stupid:”

On the other hand, if an RFID tag responds with just a license plate number, that can be checked against an up-to-date back-end database without human intervention. And the only information exposed by the RFID tag is already displayed on the vehicle’s bumper.

…

What we’d really like is a clear set of RFID best practices. But in the meantime, we’ll just have to remind ourselves to keep the tags as simple as possible and keep the data on them to a minimum. If we must include data, it should be encrypted — but less data is better.

A reasonable approach, but only what’s “displayed on the vehicle’s bumper” isn’t a fixed measure of privacy, given advances in machine vision, and in more rapid access to multiple databases in multiple jurisdictions for multiple purposes.