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Radio Frequency Identification-Who's watching the watchers?

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Radio Frequency Identification-Who's watching the watchers?

Postby Kathy » 7/24/2006, 7:00 am

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... ology/home


A silicon chip in your Viagra pack reports back to Pfizer on how much you took, and when. You fetch the last Coke from your chip-tagged fridge and your TV airs a Pepsi ad. Your phone company combs your trash for the chips you've cast off, selling the data it finds to marketers. And when you pick up pricey pasta at the supermarket, a screen on your shopping cart flashes an ad for a high-end sauce to go with it.


Science fiction? Not at all.

The plans to "spy-chip" your fridge belong to Procter & Gamble, which has a second patent pending to track consumers in-store. American telecommunications giant BellSouth has a patent pending on the garbage-picking. NCR is behind the shopping cart ads and also holds a patent on "automated monitoring of shoppers" at grocery stores. As for Viagra, like OxyContin, its manufacturers are already tagging bulk bottles at the pharmacy (packs of Diovan, an antihypertensive, are actually tagged individually).

Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, is surveillance technology at its finest -- cheap, invisible, infallible, ubiquitous -- and privacy advocates abhor it. Silently, without even a bar code beep, RFID reads and records people's behaviour and inventories their possessions.

Benetton was the first large retailer to find out the hard way that not everyone likes being watched. In 2003, consumer outrage forced it to recall millions of garments it had embedded with microchips.

....

Meanwhile, the centre's press material says monitoring people, as well as products, is a chief use of RFID, in Canada and elsewhere.

In the United States, IBM may be sewing up this side of the business. It holds a patent to build RFID peepholes into the walls and ceilings of public places, washrooms included. These will surreptitiously identify passersby and look into purses, pockets and briefcases.

...

In the U.S., patients are RFID-equipped on admission to hospital. Soon the tagging of patients, health records and prescriptions may seem like everyone at the party is having a look inside your medicine cabinet -- and not just those you have authorized. Johns Hopkins University engineers say RFID is hackable; health and credit particulars can be plucked from the air. Tags will soon be read from long distances, making systems leakier.

But consumer profiles built "legitimately" might hurt you more than hackers ever could. In 2003, a New England grocery chain developed "Smart Mouth" software to analyze the habits of each of its shoppers, converting their records into dietary profiles. To recoup expenses, the grocer said it planned to share its data with a selection of health maintenance organizations wanting to know which of their clients "had had too many steaks" and brought their ill health on themselves: no more coverage for them.

...

(lots more to the article that I'm not pasting here)

I enjoy debates about this stuff. Comments I've seen elsewhere are:
-"who cares if you have nothing to hide"
-"everyone is out to get us"
-"everything is already tracked (Interac, IE, Mastercards, Drivers license) so this is just one more little thing"
-"information will fall into the wrong hands or be used in the wrong way"
-"corporate greed"

Any thoughts?
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Postby myownsatellite » 7/24/2006, 7:35 am

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595550208/sr=8-1/qid=1153748071/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3442645-9929456?ie=UTF8">Spychips</a> came out last year. Wasn't very popular. I'm not sure many Americans care.
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Postby AnnieDreams » 7/24/2006, 8:20 am

At first it seems ok, showing you some tomato sauce to go with your pasta is nice and helpful. But the idea of having chips in everything, and having everything under surveilance?
I may not have anything to hide, but not having the option still troubles me.
For some reason, I really don't like the idea of a society with no room for sneaking around.
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Postby Bandalero » 7/24/2006, 11:17 am

I don't even carry a cell phone cause i don't want people to find me when i'm out of town, so you can imagine how this angers me.
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my boots are broken my brain is sore, fer keepin' up with thier little world, i got a heavy load.
gonna leave 'em all just like before, i'm big city bound, your always 17 in your hometown
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Postby xjsb125 » 7/24/2006, 4:47 pm

I'll put my thoughts on this in later in the week.
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Postby myownsatellite » 7/24/2006, 9:24 pm

It reminds me a lot of what goes on in the futuristic sci-fi I read sometimes.

Generally, I don't like that kind of sci-fi, so I'd feel pretty freakin' pissed if people started doing that to me.

Honestly though, I really think that at least Americans are way too apathetic and uninformed to really care enough and make it stop. For a very long time we've been conditioned to be sheep.

...And I am suddenly reminded of the video for <i>Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums</i> by A Perfect Circle.
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Postby Hope » 7/24/2006, 9:36 pm

this is pretty creepy, but i can't say i'm surprised.

:uhh:
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Postby ihatethunderbay » 7/24/2006, 10:16 pm

Some times I want to kill people. This is one of those times.
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Postby Korzic » 7/24/2006, 10:17 pm

myownsatellite wrote:...And I am suddenly reminded of the video for <i>Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums</i> by A Perfect Circle.


That song sucked.

We are all robots, these new chips are simply upgrades. We, as robots have been demanding these upgrades for a long time. They enable the mechanic robots to better monitor us if we break down. It will provide the Overseer with a great opportunity to further develop us into a higher state of robotness.
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Postby Kathy » 7/25/2006, 4:52 am

myownsatellite wrote:Honestly though, I really think that at least Americans are way too apathetic and uninformed to really care enough and make it stop. For a very long time we've been conditioned to be sheep.


Most Canadians too.

You know, I wonder when and exactly how people changed from publicly protesting against things to being completely uninvolved and apathetic about everything.
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Postby nelison » 7/25/2006, 8:24 am

When they realized that no matter who they put in power the result was the same.
I can't wait until the day schools are over-funded and the military is forced to hold bake sales to buy planes.

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Postby myownsatellite » 7/25/2006, 10:31 am

Korzic wrote:
myownsatellite wrote:...And I am suddenly reminded of the video for <i>Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums</i> by A Perfect Circle.


That song sucked.


The original version from the second album was great, the remake for the third album and the video was terrible.

J-Neli wrote:When they realized that no matter who they put in power the result was the same.


And when they saw that no matter how much they protested, nothing ever changed.
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Postby afealicious » 7/25/2006, 7:31 pm

1984 anyone?
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Postby Gimme_Shelter » 8/7/2006, 8:37 pm

I know who is

the watch watchers
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Postby Gimme_Shelter » 8/13/2006, 4:50 pm

honestly, thats got to be who
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Postby Esotarious » 8/13/2006, 5:31 pm

Very interesting subject. Especially since i've been getting an RFID company off of the ground for the last 2 to 3 years.

The examples that fuel this forum are severe extremes, and in the case of the technology...the technology itself is nowhere near able to do those things yet. The patents filed at this point are merely "If it ever becomes possible for us to do this than maybe we'll do it."

That said, there are a lot of things that RFID will be doing in the future. It WILL let you customize your fridge to say when there are no more cokes...then put it on my grocery list. Will it show rival ads? Only if you let it. Just like so much technology it's going to be very customizable. It's going to mold itself to your lifestyle.

And there is a huge huge huuuuge opposition to RFID going on right now. Wal-Mart had plans to utilize it in stores heavily for inventory tracking. and other special things These tags are a bit more worrisome because they are "active" and have much larger read ranges than a passive tag which can only be read from a few inches away, but they met with all sorts of groups that said no way...and they shelved most of the project. I have noticed that they've been creeping the technology slowly into stores instead of havinga massive rollout. You can usually see if the store is using RFID because there will be some sort of sticket as you walk in the second set of front doors at a walmart that says something about it.

When it comes right down to it RFID is a good and bad technology. It's been around for over 50 years and isn't new technology. Those "EZ Pass" credit cards.....yeah those are RFID too. Really RFID is just a wireless barcode honestly. Anything that a laser scanning a barcode can do...an RFID tag can do. This does create lots of interesting ideas for automation in the future, but I wouldn't worry...it's the wonderful future....as long as we're careful.

Anyways, great topic...and the answer is that there are no right answers.
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Postby Joe Cooler » 8/25/2006, 1:16 am

You know, you make a good point. I may have to re-evaluate my world view. Again.
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Postby Henrietta » 8/25/2006, 3:13 pm

I hate doing that.
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Postby Joe Cooler » 8/25/2006, 3:49 pm

It's the worst.
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