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They hate it.
CNET News.com recently ran a report on companies with technologies that involve implanting RFID chips under people's skin or inside a bracelet.
The issue has united people with fairly strong religious beliefs and libertarian privacy advocates.
Even Steve Wozniak, the lovable lug of technology, is promoting human tracking in technology developed by his Wheels of Zeus start-up.
Nearly every reader who wrote News.com about the story expressed outrage and disdain.
"I couldn't help but notice that one of the most effective uses for the RFID tags on humans was in a prison setting--which is exactly what society in general would become, if this particular technology were mandated somehow," Harold Davis of Syracuse, N.Y., wrote.
The fear that the technology will enable governments to keep tabs on everyone was the concern raised most often. Hypothetically, law enforcement agencies or even private security companies will be able to track where you've been, with whom you associate and what you own with this technology. Imagine a semiretired senior citizen in a rented maroon blazer knowing everything about your day.
Worse, that person could begin to bombard you (or at least your cell phone) with ads or messages.
"What can transmit signals may also be capable of receiving signals from a central computer. Now there's something to think about, eh?" a News.com reader named Max wrote from the United Kingdom. "This biochip project has been in the pipeline for decades. It is now about to bear fruit, to the detriment of all free-thinking people."
A large number of letters also asserted that human RFID tags are a demonic tool. Several pointed out that in the Bible, Revelations 13:16-17 read: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
A few anatomical inconsistencies aside, the description is kind of close. On top of this, a beach resort in Spain does in fact use implanted RFID tags as part of a payment system.
"When our society reaches the point that credit cards can easily be faked, look for a push to implant a chip that will take over our trade institutions," reader Jeff Phelps wrote.
A large number of letters also asserted that human RFID tags are a demonic tool.
To top it off, others noted that even the so-called advantages are minor at best.
"What if I want to go to Wal-Mart? I get a basket, get the stuff I need and literally walk out. Oh! Slow down, beating heart," Bob Cowger of Poteet, Texas, wrote. "Or I go to the local library. Pick what I want from the shelves. Walk out the door with everything being okayed by the computer system because I have MY RFID CHIP implanted. Oh! Joy!"
As for kidnap protection, Cowger predicted that RFID tags will send a signal to police, who will pursue kidnappers, who in turn will toss the victim on the freeway. As a consolation, the paramedics would have known what medicines not to give the deceased victim.
The tenor of the debate indicates a few harsh realities for those promoting this technology, a list that includes Royal Philips Electronics, IBM, Intel, Wal-Mart Stores and the technology ministries of Japan and South Korea.
For one thing, this is going to be one long, ugly, uphill battle. The issue has united people with fairly strong religious beliefs and libertarian privacy advocates. That doesn't happen often.
On the other hand, the relationship between consumers and industry isn't even close to a crisis point. At the turn of the last century, corporate leaders often faced assassination attempts, and striking factory employees sometimes got shot. Try to double-park in front of, or across the street from, an office of J.P. Morgan Chase. Private security officers will immediately shuffle you away, the legacy of a 1920 bombing at the financial institution's New York offices.
Many wrote to say they fear that the tracking technology will be exploited to monitor our private lives--but that won't likely happen. Governments and companies won't have the time or energy to sift through all that data. Even if they do, what will they figure out? That car thieves are among the most loyal consumers of Sunny Delight?
On a gut level, I think that much of the antagonism against the technology is rooted in a general distrust of large institutions. Anyone who has been stuck on hold when phoning for help knows that the standard of customer service continues to plummet.
But in the end, people distrust RFID, I believe, because it forces people to get tagged like a circus bear so that an already overpaid executive can obtain a bonus for cutting costs. If companies want to win the public over to this technology, they are going to have to be the ones jumping through hoops.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
43 comments
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Before you go ahead and egg on corporate types to "jump through hoops" to convince consumers into using RFID, do some research and ask why consumers are not so trusting. Would *you* be willing to put a RFID tag under your skin?
Visit here for a start:
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.nocards.org/" target="_newWindow">http://www.nocards.org/</a>
(that work was done while employed at a private company that contracted with local and county agencies)
You want a solution? Vote Libertarian and join them in the fight for the right to manage your own body!!!
To the religious nuts who think its the 'mark of the beast'. I just say this... don't you think maybe you're thinking alittle too much of yourself too? I mean, do you really think you know the will of god? Who are you to say what God meant? The idea that you do know, that you can interpret his message better... or worse that you can see god's prophecies and some how are so superhuman that you can prevent them from happening... prevent gods will... that you're opinion reigns supreme because everyone else is wrong cause you know what god meant... doesn't that sound a little crazy? I think if I was god, I wouldn't like a bunch of people who think they know my mind jumping up and saying things in my name.... But then again, I don't pretend to know gods mind or opinion on anything. I'm just a man, how could I.
What? that's not relevant?
Okay, well then why not turn on the unique ID number on your Pentium Processor?
Why was there so much fuss when M$ was gathering private information at the Windows update site? Your OS serial is just a number, after all and M$ would never track you or the software on your computer.
Why did our founding fathers think that the "...right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." was so important?
Gadzooks! Have you no vision?
Imagine walking into walmart and your rfid implant identifies you. You grab a "Smartcart" and it greets you by name and compliments you on the blouse that you bought last month. It then suggests that perhaps you need some milk since you purchased your last gallon nearly a week ago. While you trolly around, the "smartcart" also informs you that you could have saved nearly $20 by buying the shoes that you're wearing at Wal-Mart instead of Payless. And finally, when you head towards the checkout it politely reminds you that you may be needing a box of tampons soon since "that time of month" is due and the last box you bought was over two months ago.
So you head to the local bar and buy a round of drinks for the girls. After an hour of gossip and laughs you get in your car and it informs you that it will not start - you purchased too many drinks and may be legally intoxicated -- please blow into the breathalyzer.
Once you pass your OnStar sobrity test you drive home listening to XFM commercials specially tailored to your social level, spending habits and economic means.
Isn't life grand?
Private companies have NO SUCH restrictions. When the government wants information who does it goes to get it? Private firms who can share any and all data to ANYONE who is willing to pay for it.
Privacy statements? They can - and are - written to allow the company to do what it wants. And it can be changed at any time without notice - just like many contracts - the power is in the company and not people. Unless you boycot and that only works for items you can live without.
Look at some high profile cases - Okahoma city bombing as an example - they were solved not with Government sources but PRIVATE security cameras looking over streets, tracking information collected by firms which can do what they want with it that data. Want a credit report do you go to the Federal / State / Local government to get it? no, private firms control the data on you and you have to usually pay to see it (except in certain cases) and if something is wrong you have virtually no recourse at all since they just 'collect the facts as reported to them' and are in no way responsible on how those 'facts' are used by people who get those reports.
Next time you shop at Wal-Mart wave to the video cameras since they can do what they want with those images of you, your car license plate and sell that data of you shopping habits, type of car you drive to anyone they want - cause you are on private land and every Government rule on sharing information does not apply to private companies.
When government contacts out to 3rd parties it usually means those companies own the data - not the Government.
What that involves is anyone's guess. World-wide famine?... war... perhaps involving nuclear weapons? I'll repeat from my post on the previous article, I am a fan of the idea of a mass alien abduction (that would be sufficient to throw the markets and the world into chaos).
Whatever it takes... suffice it to say, it hasn't happened yet. But... mark *my* words... when it does, people *will* line up to get these things 'cause it will make perfect sense then.
=o/
The reader *is* looking at the future.
There *will* be medical implications to these devices in human bodies, but such implications will not be known before the devices are implemented because the symptoms will only show up over a prolonged period of excessive daily use (no such test data currently available).
Do this. Browse to here:
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm" target="_newWindow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm</a>
Then search for either of these numbers:
5166676
6466634
Then let the reader take note that the middle three numbers in each is: 666 =o)
(heh... no one ever said the folks down at the patent office were particularly brilliant)
;o)
Like the gun owners code. "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers."
They can plant that chip in my cold dead body. Anyone who thinks government and others won't abuse that knowledge needs to buy my ocean front property here in Oklahoma. I'll toss in the Brooklyn Bridge for free.
The organizational entity to fear regarding RFID is Government Bureaucrats, not Checkout Clerks at Wal-Mart.
Private industry only wants your money in trade for goods or services. They want to keep you happy, productive and voluntarily spending more of your hard earned money on stuff at their establishment, to make them more profitable. If they want even more of your money, they must build a better mouse trap, tech toy or run a Blue-Lite Special.
The Government, on the other hand, could care less about profitability, productivity or efficiency, yours or theirs. They dont care if youre happy or productive. Regarding your money, you must involuntarily spend your hard earned money on taxes so the Government can use it to buy stuff, while making zero-profit for you and them. If they want even more of your money, they just raise your taxes some more.
Private Industry doesnt have designs on your liberty, the Government does. Wal-Mart only wants to RFID tag merchandise to better serve you, so they can make more money. Uncle Sam wants to tag & bag everything and everyone, in their Global Fight Against Terrorism, to better serve their Bureaucrats at the 24/7/365 tracking and monitoring of your financial transactions and movement across the planet.
1) Gov't doesn't need to track everyone in order to control everyone. They just need to show that they can track anyone that they care to track, and occasionally make examples of people who get out of line. FEAR is what controls everyone. This is quite evident from the history of all totalitarian states. Even in the USA, you can see the effect whenever the police set up a speed trap. Why does everyone immediately go from flagrant speeding to 10 mph below the limit? After all, clearly the police can only catch a very few speeders, so any one driver's risk of getting a ticket is low. Yet everyone slows down!
2) Computers can do much of the tracking and penalizing, so that the burden on gov't employees is not nearly as large as the author seems to think. Consider how computers with cameras have made it so easy for cities to rake in the money from speeders and red light runners. Now just imagine heartless computers monitoring your every move like that, and automatically penalizing you for whatever the gov't considers an infraction. And, to tie this in with point #1, consider that fake cameras do almost as good of a job at behavior modification as real cameras.
3) Once the totalitarian state is established, the gov't doesn't even have to do most of the monitoring, because people monitor each other. I don't know why people cooperate with the oppressor like that, but it is a proven historical fact. So RFID tracking of people, even supplemented with computers, is really only a catalyst to bring about the ultimate goal: a perverse corruption of our ideas of freedom.
One bit of data on you - when there is nothing else to corelate with - is meaningless. 10 million bits of identical data with 10 million other non-corelating data is also meaningless. But if 7 million other people have loads of information on them then it can be infered that you are likely to be like them since you too have that single bit of data associated with you as you get RFID'd.
RFID Wal-Mart tracking in the supply train makes them more efficient by taking less time to have a person physically count stuff as it moves along thus saving personnel costs and time from manufacture to customer purchase.
Tracking what you bought if you paid cash or a credit right now is possible since every item is bar coded and scanned.
RFID embedded items can be read as you walk around, transmit what you have to stations, and because of the power of statistics, look up in their database determine that people who had x and x in their cart usually got Y also then market to you Y as you walk along the aisle or at the checkout stand.
Tie this to a name and over time they have can have a very detailed knowedge base of what a person uses and thereby does.
What will do they with this data? market to you, sell the data to others (either with or without your name, remember they can make up their own rules as what to do with the data, Government rules only concern Government, not private collection of data).
Now, the Government can then go to a court and get them to give THEM the data on you individually, or a group of people, or area. They are not collecting the data at that point but just using it legally to solve X.
Once RFID becomes prevalent everywhere, then it opens up a lot of other seen and un-foreseen avenues both legal, illegal, and unintended possibilites of tracking items and people.
As menioned, power corrups. RFID gives any company - or person - a lot of power to collect data and use it as they see fit to employ that data.
A private security company could install RDID readers all over a town in storefronts - private land - and as people walk by with active RFIDs in their possesion track their every move legally. Reason - someone steals something from a store. With RFID they can track it instantly as to where it is and private security people can then go there and hold the people who have the stolen RFID until the government police arrive.
Go to Disneyland, you get a RFID pass that you must use purchase stuff as you go around and you are instantly tracked. They can then see how people move around and adjust their rides, pavilions etc to steer people toward what they want you to go and see - and spend at. Private land they can do that.
The possibilities are endless.
That is what I, and others, look at seeing as happenning once people accept RFIDs in everything as "normal" and harmless.
Tom Philo
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.taphilo.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.taphilo.com/</a>
after peeking at the site (lame) i would like to am pleased to soothe you, just providing some tips in the spanish language.
it is rather a "virtual beach" or a club, with some gay flavour, i'd dare to say
the chip is implanted to voluntary people who want to get into the "vips lounge" (AIDS prevention and tracking, i guess)
i can't see any straight relation to those fightening orwell scenarios
Impossible, you say? Just wait, the technology will develop. As for legal or moral issues, look at the SS#. It wasn't supposed to be a universal identifier. In fact, it's use as a universal ideantifier was initially forbidden except for use in the Social Security program. Now you can't get a bank account, a job, medical care, a phone or many other of life's necessities without revealing your number.
So you're going to refuse to be barcoded, RFID chipped or genetically scanned? Have fun making your moral stand. In the end, though, it will only make life difficult for you and your family and then you'll give in anyway. Just like everone already has on the SS#.
And the database, universally available over the Internet, will know everything about you except what you keep hidden in your heart and close to your soul.
1) Will not be readable after the item is sold.*
Customer can, however, request the tag be readable after sale, to possibly expedite return.
2 Will not contain information to identify the individual, product, store, or date of purchase.*
RespectRFID tag contains only an ID number.
3)Will not track a customer.
The package is tagged, not the customer.
4)Will not enable a store to identify customers paying with cash.
Tagging does not, however, prevent stores obtaining customer information from credit or loyalty cards.
5)Will not save photos of shoppers it saves images only of shoplifters.
We will have a legal injunction against users who keep videos of non-shoplifters.
6) Will not allow a store to instantaneously show advertisements based on customer preferences.
We will have a legal injunction against users who have this type of advertising.
The benefits of RespectRFID to the retail customer beyond respecting privacy, can include:
1)Provides the customer with product price and availability information before going to a store (via web).
2)Provides the customer with a way to find items in the store,
especially customers who are handicapped.**
3)Provides the customer with a way to get detailed product information,
especially for customers more comfortable with a language other than English.**
4)Provides the customer with lower prices,
due to significant reduction in shoplifting and other retailer costs.
5)Provides the customer with more direct access to products in a store. Theft prevention eliminates the need for locked cabinets, etc.
6) Provides the customer with safer products.
RespectRFID reduces counterfeited, contaminated, and past-date products.
7) Provides the customer with the option of ordering over the web or telephone and have the items picked up a closer location or delivered to his home.
* While we have been unable to design a useable killable tag , we believe that the associated privacy concerns are covered by items # 1, 2, and 3 in the first list
** Uses RespectRFID cyberclerk function: www.Respectrfid.com/Ref/cyber_clerk.htm
Criminials, by definition, do not abide by rules so they have no need to follow any rules - or any laws for that matter - on what they do with RFID.
Your're right, RFID tracks packages. Just like the ability to find a cell phone signal only locates the cell phone and not the person using it - oh wait, they are holding it but since it only identifies the CELL PHONE there is no problem. Now apply this to an RFID that is not "turned off."
Once turned off can it again be turned on? Your statement seems to imply it can. Have not read if they can be dynamtically reset to act like a transponder again. (Which is what they really are, miniture IFF devices.)
You really wrote into every contract license that every store who uses any type of RFID cannot read items in a cart and use that collection of data to market inside their own store in real time?
That is surprising.
UPC codes went through some of these same fears and problems in the late 60s when first test marketed. The difference is that as a pure passive tracking system that requires direct physical interaction in order to be read there is less threat of tracking surreptitiously.
RFIDs can be read surreptitiously and thus provide a way to track people carrying items with RFIDs without them knowing it is where the fear that many people have.
People fear the Government, but the Government rarely has been able to implement a tracking system on its own. It has almost always adopted what the private sector companies first pioneered. Only in signal intelligence and photo analysis has any Government really been the leader due to war or fear of war.
Private companies have virtually no restrictions on what they can do with data collected. See my prior post.
In 20 years we will find out eh?
As histoey has shown when a power is in conflict with a different view to the norm, which is believed at the time then all out war is created using whatever means available at the time.
RFID tags are but one of the many weapons that WILL be used to put down any insurgencies, that will control the masses. Think about where we come from where were at and where were heading,
The future does contain if's and but's, it's not a very pretty or rosey picture.
Think off terminator, armageddon, end times,
and you,ll get the picture.
Supermarket club cards show that the general public is quite happy to give up detailed personal information, including buying habits and patterns, in exchange for a discount at the checkout counter.
Offer consumers a 5% discount on all purchases made through the implanted RFID chip, and they will line up for blocks to implanted...
http://tommyswindow.com/phocadownload/english/an_ATM_card_under_your_skin.ppsx
Be not be deceived by what seems convenient and harmless!
Here we go:
If the government won't be monitoring us, because they so called 'don't have the time' then why the need to be so invasive? I have no problem with allowing the government to verify my ID. That doesn't bug me at all, as I am not committing a crime. I do have a problem when the government, which is run by corporate shills for companies such as MONSANTO, have access to information as to what I the individual eat. Companies have no right to know if Joe Blow eats bananas three times a week, or which brand he buys and where he buys it. If the goal is to have a paperless currency, the government will know who buys what and when. They won't care about Joe Blow, the want access to dissenters, people who question and people that oppose.
If I say anything negative against the government or how it is run, what stops a government from turning off my chip? Tampering with my supermarket? This chip is supposed to be in our hands, we must ask, why in our hands!? So we don't lose them?! So the corporations are guaranteed the best access to our behaviors. What gives them the right? I have read these things cause tumors, TUMORS, around the chip in some people. Not only that, ask the question if the government is so keen to know your behavior then does this chip have some way to manipulate it? Humans respond to electronic stimuli in different ways, we have no idea what this chip can actually do! I didn't sign up for this, and neither did anyone else!
Medic alert bracelets?! Remember those? People who have serious illnesses and the such should be wearing medic alert bracelets. There is no instance when people take these off, so why it is necessary to implant these chips into our hands?
They have gone way too far with this one. From my research the government have been planning this for years - and the introduction in my opinion, is very premature. What is the rush? I don't think anyone will buy into this and it just waking people up to the absolute control the government desires and has been unleashing on us.
Paperless currency, eh? Do the government really want people to stumble upon what is really going on? This is an excellent way to awakening the people; I see a massive backfire in the midst.
ORANGE