Supporters of RFID say that they will protect your personal information... right up until you say something they don't like.

RFID tags may eventually replace bar-code labels on all consumer goods. When exposed to radio signals, they transmit a unique serial number for individual items and help manufacturers, distributors and retailers keep track of every item in their inventory. But privacy groups, led by Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (or CASPIAN), fear that businesses and governments can use those signals to track individuals' movements inside stores and in public places.

One organization may have been shamed into soliciting CASPIAN's advice, however. The Grocery Manufacturers of America this week inadvertently sent an internal e-mail to CASPIAN suggesting it was looking for embarrassing information about the group's founder, Katherine Albrecht.

The e-mail, written by a college intern at GMA, reads, "I don't know what to tell this woman! 'Well, actually we're trying to see if you have a juicy past that we could use against you.'"

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Unless they implement something that disables them as you leave the store like that German store is doing, I will move. I swear, this is getting so damn stupid. Lose our privacy over groceries and such? Absurd...

Yeah I'm not into being tracked by electronic tagging devices. I'll leave without looking back. I wont stand to be treated like a citizen of a communistic country. We are headed towards nazi germany.

I used to work for a company that has operated the largest RFID network in the world for military and industrial supply chains and warehouses for years. I can tell you flat out that most of these fears and laughable.

Warehouses and such use RFID tags with ranges of around a few hundred yards however these things are the size of a brick, take a battery and a expensive.

The tags that are used to track single items and would tag groceries and stuff are tiny, use inductive power (which means that it's dorment unless it is actively being read), store very little, if any, information and have shit for range. We're talking a foot or two, tops. This will probably change as time wears on but Big Brother is not coming in a radio chip near you.

Here's a wacky idea too. After you buy something with a tag on it... take the thing off and throw it away.

Besides, anyone who wants to keep track of what you buy already does it. RFID changes nothing.

Shit ... "and laughable" = "are laughable" and "a expensive" = "are expensive"

I guess I just hate that word today or something.

One example: The Hitatchi µ-chip is 0.4mm square. A wee little sprite of a thing. Anyone care to guess its maximum communication range?

25 centimeters.

That's about 10 inches for us yanks. Oh yeah, they'll be sitting outside your house scanning everything you own with that mighty power, huh?

Calm down everybody. This stuff is not that big a deal. Of course, there is the understood "yet" at the end there but at this point it is NOT prudent to listen to doomsayers because THIS time, they don't know what they are talking about.

For a great site on the RFID issue...please check out
www.nocards.org

http://www.nocards.org/AutoID/overview.shtml
"The implications of RFID

"Theft will be drastically reduced because items will report when they are stolen, their smart tags also serving as a homing device toward their exact location." 21 - MIT's Auto-ID Center

Since the Auto-ID Center's founding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999, it has moved forward at remarkable speed. The center has attracted funding from some of the largest consumer goods manufacturers in the world, and even counts the Department of Defense among its sponsors. 22 In a mid-2001 pilot test with Gillette, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, and Wal-Mart, the center wired the entire city of Tulsa, Oklahoma with radio-frequency equipment to verify its ability to track RFID equipped packages. 23



Though many RFID proponents appear focused on inventory and supply chain efficiency, others are developing financial and consumer applications that, if adopted, will have chilling effects on consumers' ability to escape the oppressive surveillance of manufacturers, retailers, and marketers. Of course, government and law enforcement will be quick to use the technology to keep tabs on citizens, as well.


The European Central Bank is quietly working to embed RFID tags in the fibers of Euro banknotes by 2005. 24 The tag would allow money to carry its own history by recording information about where it has been, thus giving governments and law enforcement agencies a means to literally "follow the money" in every transaction. 25 If and when RFID devices are embedded in banknotes, the anonymity that cash affords in consumer transactions will be eliminated.


Hitachi Europe wants to supply the tags. The company has developed a smart tag chip that--at just 0.3mm square and as thin as a human hair -- can easily fit inside of a banknote. 26 Mass-production of the new chip will start within a year. 27


Consumer marketing applications will decimate privacy

"Radio frequency is another technology that supermarkets are already using in a number of places throughout the store. We now envision a day where consumers will walk into a store, select products whose packages are embedded with small radio frequency UPC codes, and exit the store without ever going through a checkout line or signing their name on a dotted line." 28 - Jacki Snyder, Manager of Electronic Payments for Supervalu (Supermarkets), Inc., and Chair, Food Marketing Institute Electronic Payments Committee


RFID would expand marketers' ability to monitor individuals' behavior to undreamt of extremes. With corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, Target, the Food Marketing Institute, Home Depot, and British supermarket chain Tesco, as well as some of the world's largest consumer goods manufacturers including Proctor and Gamble, Phillip Morris, and Coca Cola 29 it may not be long before RFID-based surveillance tags begin appearing in every store-bought item in a consumer's home."

You know, speaking as an engineer who has built, installed and programmed these types of things and, you know, knows what he's talking about... Nocard.org is some funny shit.

Any ID device powerful enough to be at all useful as a "homing device" that phones home will also be physically large enough to remove and disable as well as cost prohibitive for anything other than really big ticket items. You won't see them on a DVD or a box of Cheerios. Maybe cars and things of that nature. Maybe.

Currency already has a serial number and is tracked far more than most people are aware of. Anyone who wants to match cash to a person can just write it down. A chip would just shift the burden from the transacting party.

Remember folks, range. You aren't going to do much with 25 centimeters. Also remember that they use inductive power. I wonder what would happen if you introduced the little chip into a magnetic field that induced more power than it could handle? Hmmmm... heh heh heh. When those tiny little things can be read from a mile away then we'll talk. Until then, excuse me while I chuckle.

Actually there is no maybe when it comes to cars and many expensive products. Most do call home. Especially when concerned with computers on the internet. The majority of the software on your computer will attempt to call home and many new computers use the networks to anounce their presence allow the manufacturer to check to see if it has been stolen and where to find it if it has.

I must agree mastethom using that technology to track people is pretty unlikely. Bouncing a signal off a little peace of metal and trying to read the result is not a very good means of long distance communication. The technology will get better but unless the thing becomes equiped with a power transmiter of some sort going as far as the driveway will be a task. Theoritically posible but then again in theory it is theoritacally posible that radio wave meerly get infinately small but are always present. That doesn't mean we are going to read a little bleep of a radio signal from miles away.
However there is a real issue there that does need to be addressed and that is the issue of controlling our consumer behavior. Tags on our money would just enhance their ability to do so. But as you have pointed out tracking is already done so it probably would have much of an effect.
But how would you like it if you were ejected from a resturant because a mechine at the door determined you had less money in your wallet than the person behind you?

But how would you like it if you were ejected from a resturant because a mechine at the door determined you had less money in your wallet than the person behind you?

I'd wonder how they got around pesky things like radio physics, range limitations (is someone waving a wand at my ass to check my wallet?) and signal collision.

If they ever put tags in money, I'm putting all my cash in the microwave for 30 seconds. Chip fried = problem solved.

I think a bulk eraser is better for disarmng RFIDs

Mastethom - its nocards.org , not
nocard.org...that just leads to one of those search sites they have for the occasions when people wrongly type a URL

Bulk erasers might not work with the kinds of tags that are most likely to be used in single items and currency. The little ones are usually just a ROM chip that is written during manufacter to have their own number that is immutable. Others are actually hardwired with their number and have no real memory that can be erased at all.

The best way to disarm them is to destroy them and that's ridiculously easy to do with the little guys. You can also block, disrupt, confuse or cancel the singal in several different ways too.

Take currency for example. Any chip small enough to be embedded in currency, especaily the paper kind, can be defeated easily. Just wrap your wallet in aluminium foil or carry it inside of an anti-static bag like computer cards come in. I still like outright distruction though. It's as easy as anything else and only requires being done once.

hmmmmm.....sounds a lot like what religious circles call the Mark of the Beast....the total control of humanity...the beginnings thereof.

I honestly not into people knowing what Im doing in the privacy of my own home aslo, without my persmission.

Mastethom said: "I still like outright distruction though. It's as easy as anything else and only requires being done once."

I have to agree. Even techtv says the two best ways of permanently deleting information from your hard drive is:

1) acid, or

2) trusty sledgehammer.

Take all the tags and stick them under the seat of a taxi. That ought to keep them busy.

Zuckuss: I worked in a grocery store when I was in high school and was there when they started implementing those anti-theft magnet tags like the kind you find in DVDs. We put them on drugs, condoms and shit.

They caught a few people and then they got wise to it and started digging the tags out of the boxes so we wouldn't catch them. On top of that, some people would stuff them into other things like paper towel rolls. That made for some amusing occasions.

they could always just put the tags in the handles of the shopping carts that way they would know where in the store customers usually go...