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Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia on RFID. New RFIDs are much
cheaper, flexible, and printed via polymers. They can be read at
considerable distances. Peace, D. Mindock
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Controversy
The use of RFID technology has engendered considerable controversy and even product boycotts by consumer privacy advocates such as Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre of CASPIAN who refer to RFID tags as "spychips". The four main privacy concerns regarding RFID are:
Most concerns revolve around the fact that RFID tags affixed to products remain functional even after the products have been purchased and taken home, and thus can be used for surveillance and other nefarious purposes unrelated to their supply chain inventory functions. Such unattended RFID tags also pose environmental risks [16]. Although RFID tags are only officially intended for short-distance use, they can be interrogated from greater distances by anyone with a high-gain antenna, potentially allowing the contents of a house to be scanned at a distance, something distinctly Orwellian in nature. Even short range scanning is a concern if all the items detected are logged in a database every time a person passes a reader, or if it is done for nefarious reasons (e.g., a mugger using a hand-held scanner to obtain an instant assessment of the wealth of potential victims). With permanent RFID serial numbers, an item leaks unexpected information about a person even after disposal; for example, items that are resold or given away can enable mapping of a person's social network. Another privacy issue is due to RFID's support for a singulation (anti-collision) protocol. This is the means by which a reader enumerates all the tags responding to it without them mutually interfering. The structure of the most common version of this protocol is such that all but the last bit of each tag's serial number can be deduced by passively eavesdropping on just the reader's part of the protocol. Because of this, whenever RFID tags are near to readers, the distance at which a tag's signal can be eavesdropped is irrelevant; what counts is the distance at which the much more powerful reader can be received. Just how far this can be depends on the type of the reader, but in the extreme case some readers have a maximum power output of 4 W, enabling signals to be received from tens of kilometres away.[citation needed] Technical note: the anti-collision scheme of ISO 15693 will render this rather implausible. To eavesdrop on the reader part of the protocol - and gather the 63 least significant bits of a uid - would require the reader to send a mask value of 63 bits. This can only happen when the reader detects a collision up to the 63rd bit. In other words: One can eavesdrop on the transmitted mask-value of the reader, but for the reader to transmit a 63 bit mask-value requires two tags with identical least significant 63 bits. The probability of this happening must be near zero. I.e. the eavesdropper needs two virtually identical tags to be read at the same time by the reader in question. The potential for privacy violations with RFID was demonstrated by its use in a pilot program by the Gillette Company, which conducted a "smart shelf" test at a Tesco in Cambridge, England. They automatically photographed shoppers taking RFID-tagged safety razors off the shelf, to see if the technology could be used to deter shoplifting. [17] This trial resulted in consumer boycott against Gillette. There was also a protest of Tesco. A boycott against Tesco for its involvement with item-level RFID tagging has been in effect since early 2005. In another incident, uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, shelves in a Wal-Mart in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, were equipped with readers to track the Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers stacked on them. Webcam images of the shelves were viewed 750 miles (1200 km) away by Procter & Gamble researchers in Cincinnati, Ohio, who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and observe the shoppers in action. In January 2004 privacy advocates from CASPIAN and the German privacy group FoeBuD were invited to the METRO Future Store in Germany, where an RFID pilot project was implemented. It was uncovered by accident that METRO "Payback" customer loyalty cards contained RFID tags with customer IDs, a fact that was disclosed neither to customers receiving the cards, nor to this group of privacy advocates. This happened despite assurances by METRO that no customer identification data was tracked and all RFID usage was clearly disclosed. [18] The controversy was furthered by the accidental exposure of a proposed Auto-ID consortium public relations campaign that was designed to "neutralize opposition" and get consumers to "resign themselves to the inevitability of it" whilst merely pretending to address their concerns. [19] During the UN World Summit on Information Society (WCIS) between the 16th to 18th of November, 2005, founder of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, protested the use of RFID security cards. During the first meeting, it was agreed that future meetings would no longer use RFID cards, and upon finding out this assurance was broken, he covered his card in tin foil, and would only uncover it at the security stations. This protest caused the security personnel considerable concern, with some not allowing him to leave a conference room in which he had been the main speaker, and then the prevention of him entering another conference room, where he was due to speak. On July 22, 2006, Reuters reported that two hackers, Newitz and Westhues, at a conference in New York City showed that they could clone the RFID frequency from a human implanted RFID chip, suggesting that the chip was not as hack-proof as previously believed. [20] |
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