Radio Frequency Identification-Who's watching the watchers?
Posted: 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?
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?
