Drawbacks of using RFID

I would just like to mention that I have received some very pleasant and complimentary private emails from contributers to this Blog and it would appear that our guest is not very well thought of, nor his viewpoint either, by several people WITH REAL names on CR4....

I would like to say openly to you all that I really appreciate your support in this matter and it has restored somewhat my hope for mankind, that recently took a bit of a nosedive!

I will still be leaving this Blog though in a few minutes , just as I said I would, because I cannot see a positive way forward. Its just going round in circles. e.g. completely pointless, because of a few (one?) unfriendly anonymous person.....but as I believe I pointed out (and it has also been mentioned by others) people with something to hide are very suspicious of others....

If RFID is implemented in a grand manner (it is already here to a degree!), I trust that the people concerned will implement it in such a way as to respect our needs for a reasonable amount of privacy. I cannot believe that it will become like Big Brother in the novel "1984".......I think that most of us are clever enough to make sure that does not happen.

I am certainly NOT going to panic about something that has not up to now happened!!

Goodbye "Drawbacks of using RFID".

And if people had not clung to similarly unrealistic hopes about Adolf Hitler's intentions, World War II could have been prevented.

Even though I disagee with you very strongly, Andy, and have lost patience with you on occasion, I wish you well.

hello world!

Here is Big Brother. I've been montoring your movements long time ago. Your "cell" phone have veen telling me where you were buying last week. last years, at wath time, if you where in a meeting I was there, if you where dancing with U2, I was there. If you where at beach, I was there. I know how long you ride, how ofen and who more was there, I was there too. Dou you play golf? or fish? Who are your weekend friends? Your coleages? Your job? Your house? How often you go to dinner out? or hospital? or church?

Can now speak about your Visa? or wish to talk abaout your internet habbits. Your power consumition?

If I want to know more, know where to find you.

Only think you can do is take care in the education of your chids. Teachin them the value of freedom and eviting they can be the arm of my power.

we are like a school of 100 billion minnows, our transactions are, and we wheel and veer the predator get a bit on occasion, but most of us swim free and give not a care for the eaten

aurizon:

100 billion transactions sounds like a lot. But it isn't.

When you can attach thousands of billions of bytes of disk storage to a garden-variety personal computer, which executes tens of billions of instructions per second, 100 billion transactions is very easy to scan for patterns. Just imagine how much more one can do with a super computer.

Any feeling of safety you may get from being only 1 out of 100 billion transactions is purely illusory. Make no mistake about that!

This is a point you have been avoiding all along, aurizon: the huge amount of computational resources and data storage capacity which are now available to government pose an entirely new kind of threat to freedom.

I am fully aware of computational resources. I just feel this makes life safer as the accountability for actions gets more pervasive so that only suicide perpetrators will do things.

If stuff cannot be stolen without a trail, soon stealing will stop, and so on..

All along more people watching means a more secure environment. This started from the village, where a stranger was instantly apparent. Now we have such a global 'village' that unknown people can freely circulate. With RFID we get back to the village concept.

I am convinced that the people who hate RFID are borderline criminals and paranoid schizophrenics

I am convinced that the people who hate RFID are borderline criminals and paranoid schizophrenics

aurizon,

It's not that the guest or I "Hate" RFID it's that we see the potential for abuse by our ever so benign government. Perhaps the Canadian, French, German and other government of the world are better at controlling their respective populations than the U.S is which is why you are willing to accept even more control. Remember, the U.S. was formed, filled and ran by people originally considered either sub-human or criminals in the afore mentioned countries. We are a country of lawless rebels.

The tracking of goods from the factory, to the store and to the check-out stand is fine but the tracking after a legal purchase needs to stop. Not everyone in the world needs to know that I just wore my size 36 white with the brown stripe underwear into the local McDonald's burger stand, nor does McDonald's need to know that I have two credit cards in my wallet. The Federal government sure as hell doesn't need to know every time I enter a public lavatory to relieve myself.

Think about this,,, I was baptised Catholic, what do you think the church would do if they could track my every move and found out I sometimes went to a Mormon Temple? How many "Hail Mary's" do you think I would be given or would I just be excommunicated from the church?

Here's another thing to give consideration. Here in the U.S. we have immigration issues involving the citizens of Mexico. Maybe we should start tagging them with RFID tags when we catch them in our country illegally. This way we can better track them, they are after all only criminals. Then after they are caught for the third time we can then prove that they are unreformed criminals and ship the to a distant prision......say located in Australia. Wouldn't that go over well.

RFID is a good idea that has it's place but limits need to be put in place to prevent abuse whether by the "government" or any other entity.

Notice, I say " if stuff cannot be stolen without leaving a trail".

People might choose to have high value items remain tracked. VCRs etc, in case they are stolen they can be ID'd. Of course smart crooks with strip the ID?? but not all crooks are smart.

There is a difference between trackable stuff and trackable people. Credit cards are going to be chipped soon, but will be packed in Faraday sleeves so they cannot be read remotely. You will buy a $1 coffee with a chipped credit card. The Dexit system was the forerunner of this, but they were done in by credit card chip capability which stole the ground thay had planned to walk on.

People may want to be not trackable. Keep those cards in their mu sleeves, and take them out when you want to.

People are already marked by their DNA, in time all kids will have a DNA sample taken at birth and kept. They do it now in case of baby mixup, but let the parents keep it. Next step national data base. Why not. You as a parent want your kid to be identifiable in accidents, like the military of many countries.

Here is a problem.... In the U.S. we are required to carry Identification when not on our property (not all but most states have this law). What is to stop my State from installing a RFID tag in my drivers licences which it requires me to carry. Might as well as have treated me like a dog and injected the thing under my skin either that or I become a criminal and disobey a law and potentially be subjected to multiple fines. Now that I'm thinking about it I wonder if I'm not already chipped? hmmmmmmm.

I would expect passports and other items they chip will come with shielded carrying wallets. A small square of mu metal or even any metal on each side will prevent access to the chip

aurizon:

You steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the danger posed by RFID comes from big government and big business. Many contributors to this thread have pointed this out to you, but your eyes are firmly closed and your fingers are firmly stuck in your ears. Whenever you have no counter argument, you pretend the point was never made.

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

Of course, that begs the question:

Why does he refuse to see?

What benefit does he expect to get out of RFID that makes enslaving the entire population an acceptable price to pay?

I will indeed be the global overlord, and I have already fitted you with quantum encrypted RFID chips.

Smirk all you want, aurizon.

And when they start doing things with your data that wipe the smirk off your face, think back to this thead on CR4.

I think an educated public will set the limits as examples of abuse crop up.

It is worth mentioning aurizon, that data-mining are considered today big-buck future.

I want to use this to generate a regimented efficiency in people with muscle control feedback loops

?

Do you mean like use the income to aid the invalids?

The perfect Army without fear of casualties, Stalin's dream. LOL

Just idle speculation about aberrant uses of RFID in a slave world with addressable radio controlled collars etc, as we have seen in Science Fiction

Biology took care of that: see ho males are being remote-controlled by their spouse, either by sanction, by pheromones of by mere estrogen control.

Called in many names from "honey-trap" to "pussy whipped".

The RFID here, is functionally males obedience to females in general, or me to my sweetheart, specifically.

If she's here asking about me, I'm off to the pub. Any pub.

I assume you're joking, aurizon, but given some of the posts you have made in all seriousness, it's hard to be sure...

In reality, the techniques are not nearly as crude as you describe. The real danger is subtle pyschological manipulation, tailor-made just for you based on knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of watching and correlating your habits.

This can be used to influence everything from what you buy to who you vote for.

And it has the advantage of plausible deniability. After all, no one forced you to vote for that candidate...

But statistcally, taken over the whole population, it is just as reliable as the crude zombie-like control you depict.

As mentioned many times in this discussion, there is an inherent likelihood that this ability to "monitor" will be used by the unscrupulous for devious purposes (much like guns built for protection are also used to threaten and control populations).

Then there is the coercement to get "tagged". In order to "conveniently" do your banking, make purchases, enter concerts, travel toll roads, travel by train or plane ... you will need your (RF)ID.

As threatening as all this seems, there is also a very insidious drawback to pervasive use if RFID technology: "Guest" really hit the mark when he(?) said "The real danger is subtle pyschological manipulation..."

Just living under the knowledge that nearly everything you do, every place you go, your eating, buying and reading habits, are all being "categorized" in some database is to live under the eye of subtle oppression. Regardless of how "nice" you think you are, there will always be the fear that your preferences may be "out of line" with some "preferred behavior".

Human Nature will not put up with that for long!

"The real danger is subtle psychological manipulation, tailor-made just for you based on knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of watching and correlating your habits"

What in hell are you blabbering about?

SImple pavloviam stuff to start. Make the ATM refuse to give your card back unless you whistle

Isn't it obvious what I'm talking about?

Every purchase you make will be recorded, as will your whereabouts at several points throughout every day of your life. Knowing what you spend your money on, and how you spend your time, makes it easy to construct a remarkably accurate psychological profile of you. As the years go by, this profile gets more and more accurate. Given your profile, it is very easy to customize every advertisement delivered to you... in such a way as to maximize the probability that it will induce you to make the purchase, or vote for the candidate, or adopt the opinion, or whatever. Whether such an advertisement succeeds or fails in getting you to do something, that fact itself is used to further refine your profile. Over the years, this individually-targeted advertising gets better and better at getting you to do things, even though you remain convinced that you are exercising your own good judgment and free will.

This is what I mean by subtle psychological manipulation, tailor-made just for you based on knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of watching and correlating your habits.

And yes, I am saying that such a profile will be maintained for every person in the country. Eventually, every person in the world. This may sound impractical, but it actually requires about the same computing power and less data storage as Google presently uses to categorize tens of billions of web pages on the internet.

In addition to that, the self-censorship that results from knowing that you are being watched is also a powerful force that affects your behavior and stunts your growth as an individual. See Ray8's post #125 above. He summarized it masterfully when he said "just living under the knowledge that nearly everything you do [is] being 'categorized' in some database is to live under the eye of subtle oppression."

Where have you been, my son?

It's alright, we know where you've been.

What did you dream, my son?

It's alright, we told you what to dream.

Welcome, my son.

Welcome... to the machine.

-- Pink Floyd

well, the credit card companies can do that now, as we see with the plice tracking stolen cards. If you pay via electronic methods this can alwyas have been done.

Pay with cash, erase the FRID chip = freedom.

I would choose my items to pay by cash with, to keep them from knowing about my predilection towards cats(knowledge of which can target you in granny gangs).

I think we have an awareness and the laws will evolve to protect us, in many cases to over protect us and harm us by barring some good uses along with the bad.

What the credit card and "air miles" companies do now is only a dim foreshadowing of what they will do with the vastly more detailed information that RFID will give them. Using cash won't help you, because the RFID tags in your clothes will identify you as you stand there paying cash for your purchase.

Whatever you do, DO NOT trust the government to enact laws that benefit the people! It has been rumored that there once were goverments that did such things, but no one alive today has ever seen it happen.

The only solution is to prevent the deployment of RFID before it happens. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I am not going to forego the benefits for your childish fears

There you go again with yet another ad hominem attack... it is disquieting to see how badly you want to win this debate, even though you have nothing substantial to say in support of your viewpoint, you have obstinately ignored all of the facts I have presented, and you have no rational counter-argument to any of the conclusions I have reached by reasoning from those facts.

I can only shake my head in amazement...

It is interesting to note that intelligent people can maintain such opposite conclusions about the value of a technology that offers such vast potential. It is in our nature to magnify the importance of features supporting our position while belittling those running counter. However, the fact that there are so many very dangerous implementations possible, leads me to conclude we should be extremely cautious in evaluating each application (with the realization that we have been living reasonably well without this gadget for all history).

We gain immense intellectual power by putting all our heads together. Hopefully open considerations like this dialog will lead us to choose a middle road such that we enjoy some of the benefits of RFID while enacting stringent safeguards to shield us from the downsides.

Ad hominem? a guest? For all I know there have been a dozen people unnder the guise of guest.

I do not want an over regulatory regime telling me what I can and cannot do. I want to be free to gain the advantages of RFID in terms of lower costs and smaller, more responsive supply chains.

As long as the RFID tag has an exit burner when you checkout, all your fear are just foolish. We all wear finger tags in our prints and some 30% have our prints on record.

I would like to see an accumulating DNA data base from children at birth and immigrants, so any DNA left at a crime scene can be tracked back to the owner.

Sure, I can steal your DNA and prints and leave them at a crime scene, but few will have that done to them.

As long as the RFID tag has an exit burner when you check out, it will be useless for the application you first suggested, way back in post #5. Namely, identifying litterbugs.

My purpose all along has been to show that we must never allow RFID to be deployed in a manner that enables such applications, because there would then be no way to prevent its abuse by big government and big business, and the consequences of such abuse would be horrible. The cure, as was said in post #9, would be much, much worse than the disease.

Since you now acknowledge the danger, at least to the extent that you now advocate that RFID tags should be rendered inoperable by the time a customer leaves the checkout stand, it seems that my work here is done.

Thank you for finally listening to reason.

RFID chips can have several sections. some can be destroyed by exit machines and other parts left alone for package tracking, possibly by a refundable deposit credited to an account that you carried that had no name, just a balance. Next time you shop you use it.

The bins that collect the trash would need to read this data, so it can get a little complex, but such a small thing as a 10¢ deposit would motivate people to go for it, esp since they see it as getting their money back.

It is not practical to make all items returnable to the place you bought them, as bulk disposal seems better.

As for litter tracked back to you personally....it is here now, just try tossing a wrapper on the sidewalk in a busy area of Tokyo, by a vigilant populace.

When someone on the street picks up your litter and hands it back to you, both of you remain anonymous. No database is created, so there is no potential for abuse.

RFID tags in the items you carry destroy your anonymity and enable systematic tracking of your actions and movements. A central database is created, so abuse is inevitable.

This difference, and the resulting danger, are not hard to understand. It has all been explained very clearly many times in this thread. By stubbornly ignoring it, you tacitly admit that you have no valid solution, and you ungraciously force the discussion to cover the same ground, over and over again.

Tiresome as this may be, it has one major benefit: it allows those who are following this thread to see that RFID can only be advocated by people who stubbornly ignore its very real dangers to privacy and freedom.

I do no stubbornly ignore the dangers. I persist in feeling they will be properly dealt with and will not be a danger.

There are those who feel we are already in danger because we already have social insurance numbers, and who do not want those expanded to a photo ID with prints or iris or other physical aspect dedicated to one ID.

Why is this? Possibly they already have several IDs and pay lower bracket taxes on them all, instead of their proper rate?

So for every specter of abuse, I contend there are extant worse abuses by people.

Here in Canada we had a bug racket in Americans coming here and going to clinics with borrowed hospital cards (free medical here in Canada). It was felt to be costing the system $100 million annually. They brought in Photo ID cards and blocked a lot of it over the strident objections of flocks of civil libertarians.

So, I do not fear these RFID at all. bring them on

To persist in feeling the dangers will be properly dealt with is to stubbornly ignore the fact the there is no way to prevent the destruction of privacy and freedom by RFID, except the prevent its deployment.

Abuses of the people by big government and big business are large and systematic and destroy civil liberties. Abuses of big government and big business by individuals are too small and random to matter. Yet you invite the former in order to prevent the latter. Again, you stubbornly ignore the unavoidable fact that the cure will be worse than the disease.

People in Western countries, like Canada, enjoy more freedom than most. However, freedom in the West reached a zenith shortly after World War II and has been declining at an accelerating rate ever since. These days in Western countries, the government no longer fears the people, but the people have come to fear the government. This single fact proves that the destruction of freedom has already gone too far (!) in Western countries. Yet this is another fact that you stubbornly ignore.

You continue to argue as though one can trust the integrity of big business and big government. But for anyone who has any understanding of the events of the last fifty years or so, this is just not possible. Yet you stubbornly ignore the evidence in this regard as well.

Therefore, either your head is firmly buried in the sand, or you have ulterior motives.

Your implication that a guest is such a low form of life that the ad hominem attack somehow becomes acceptable when the target is a guest, or that the ad hominem attack somehow becomes valid when there is more than one guest... well, these implications are simply reprehensible.

You cannot attack the man, if you do not know who the man is

Not that this stops you from trying!

I wonder what a psychiatrist would make of guest and his delusions...?

And I wonder why aurizon is not embarrassed to write something like that...?

why be embarrassed?, you are the one with the conspiracy theories. The era of greatest freedom just after WW2? That is not so. We have far more freedom now than after WW2, remember McCarthyism, the decline in police powers, miranda, and so on. If anything we have gone too far.

And now we have the police state, a disarmed populace, money movement restrictions, eminent domain expropriations, the surveillance society, and political correctness. Oh yes... this is soooo much better.

When you use the phrase "conspiracy theories," what comes to mind is a collection of childish over-simplifications mixed with bizarre superstitious nonsense. Don't try to associate these fairy tales with what I am saying.

For a taste of the underlying reality, just take a look at the relationship between the Bush administration, the Bin Laden family, the Carlyle Group, and Haliburton. Or look back a few years and consider the relationship between Prescott Bush, Allen Dulles, Fritz Thyssen, Brown Brothers Harriman, I.G. Farben, and the Nazi war effort. At that level, these so-called "conspiracies" are just business as usual, and always have been.

And you want to portray it as irrational to worry about how such people would use a technology like RFID?

Either your head is buried in the sand, or you have ulterior motives.

Having put so much effort in writing all this, wouldn't it be nicer to stop being faceless on this thread?

I follow this thread for quite some time now and wonder what is there for you by hiding as a guest so that you cannot be addressed directly with a member persona, and be misplaced or confused by other guest's replies?

Is logging on or registering procedure too much of an exposure for you?

Welcome back, Yuval!

But really, don't you think it's much more romantic to think of me as "the nameless crusader for freedom and privacy"...?

Those eyebrows are hilarious, by the way... nice!

"...don't you think it's much more romantic.."

Yes and no. Yes I think it's a positive effect on the quality of CR4 to have to respond to given statements rather than title, rank or experience. No, because it's confusing (for both readers and writers) to direct their response aimlessly, or confuse some anonymous guest with another, when responding.

"...crusader for freedom and privacy'...?"

I openly crusade for piracy of intellectual and cultural content from music to fine arts to written articles to software, and I do not do it anonymously, and advocate for it passionately, with anyone asking. Yet I do it under my real name and identity, because advocating for it does not mean I have stolen anything, only that I'm passionately for it to become free-for-all exchange instead of theft as such.

The eyebrows flapping is not mine. It's Groucho's trade-mark.

Yes, I did have an ulterior motive...we now have enough information to deal with you properly.

Oh, snap! I should have known! And here I was thinking more along the lines of something rational, like maybe you own shares in an RFID company...

Well I don't own shares, and not sharing this extreme anxiety either. Any technology and counter-technology, just like a military arms-race, is a matter of employing measures and counter those with others:

If RFID is endangering your freedom, counter-measure it with technological or legislative means.

It can also said that car-alarms are endangering the livelihood and freedom of occupation of thieves. They counter-measure it, if not by legislation, then by code-crackers and sweepers, now sold openly on the streets of some far-east countries.

Music encryption and FTP or P2P servers endangers the livelihood and freedom of occupation of musicians. They counter-measure it, by both legislation and counter-encryption.

The moral, I think is obvious.

I think an educated public will set the limits as examples of abuse crop up.

You are right because this is how most things are worked out...... after the fact. I would hope and encourage people to take a more proactive approach to setting limitations on the use of technologies, RFID being only one of thousands but one that faces the real possibility of substantial abuse.

originally posted by photonicgirl:

As you can see by this recent Wireless Technology article, "Tracking You," American Express is already using RFID to track purchases.

Tracking You What can you track with RFID? American Express received a patent to track purchases. RFID tags embedded in credit cards provide tracking information on customer purchases by reading the RFID signals from their credit card. RFID readers would be placed within store shelving, or within common areas such as schools and bus stops.

[emphasis mine]

This is just the tip of the iceberg, I fear. But private citizens are beginning to get the picture. The mere existence of an outfit like CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) is heartening. Their home page is

http://www.spychips.com/index.html

This page contains a wealth of news and articles. Also, they have put together an excellent overview of the issues at

http://www.spychips.com/rfid_overview.html

On this page, you can also download a pdf article

http://www.spychips.com/documents/Albrecht-Denver-Law.pdf

which is first rate! Very well researched and thought provoking -- a great read!

Now, here is an example of state-of-the-art RFID technology:

These are mu-chip RFID tags manufactured by Hitachi. The ones on the left are first generation devices measuring 400 microns (.4mm) square. The ones on the left are second generation devices measuring on 50 microns (.05mm) on a side, 5 microns (.005mm) thick. That big black thing that cuts the picture in half is a human hair.

These pictures were originally posted at

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/02/hitachi-develops-rfid-powder/

If you survey the comments left by people on that page, you will see that the general public is, indeed, waking up. People are seeing the danger. What is needed now is a way to organize them and galvanize them to action before complacency sets in. If we can do that, it is still early enough that we can put a stop to the proliferation of RFID by a peaceful political process.