RFID
 

Is this technology as scary as I think it is . . . or do I need to take off my tin foil hat?

Google for RFID

I think what scares me the most is currency. If every single dollar bill carrires it's own unique identifier, then annonimity is gone. Any other type of payment is a choice, and even though I can be tracked with a credit card, or a "Speed Pass" (which is RFID), I can choose to not use any of these.

The are all kinds of issues surrounding RFID. Walk into a Best Buy, and when you walk through the door a scanner records all the serial numbers from all the items you have on you (shoes, hat, cell phone, purse/bag, pants, shirt, your pack of smokes, etc). Then all those serial numbers are uploaded to a central database, cross referenced, and logged. All you have to do is have one item on you which can be directly linked to your identity, and pass through one reader, and every tag on you is then linked to you. Then every time you have any of those tags on you again, with different, unlogged tags, those unlogged tags can be easily linked back to you.

Now make these scanners prevalant enough, say as common as a credit card reader, or a telephone, and now your movement can be tracked via that d-base.

I go on an interview, my potential employer wants to see what I've been up to. He checks a database, sees that I've gone to a gay bar, been scanned ten different times in different places with the same person, who has a drug conviction (also happens to be a friend of mine, hence why I'm around him so much), and that I visited the same pub ten times in the last month. Oh ya, and he can also, with help from some more databases, see that throughout my entire college carrer, I skipped 106 classes, I own a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, The Divene Comody, 9 Tom Clancy novels, and a number of books about theoretical physics. I use a Nextel cell phone. I buy a number of Cadberry chocolate bars, I smoke (Marlboro Ultra Lights), I drink Dasani water, and use Lifestyle condoms.

Now, do you want your employer, or potential employer knowing all that about you? What about your insurance company? or the police?

This is all without any tracking of currency, throw money in the mix, anyone can see even more information.

Now this is every marketing professionals dream, which is all well and good, but as with any technology; imagine the worst possible outcome of implementation of that technology, and then decide if you really think its a good idea.

I guess I just see a whole lot of Orwellian influences with this technology, and to be honest it scares me.

/puts his tin foil hat back on

edit: vb doesn't like me

Cash is your friend.

btw there are three messages for you. And your mother called.

Well.....if you arent doing anything illegal or inappropriate, you dont have anything to worry about, now do you?

That's what many people tell me when I get concerned about this type of technology and it's use/misuse.

Keep the tin foil hat, you never know.

RFID has too many negative implications for my liking. I have no banking accounts and no credit cards. I pay all of my bills in cash at local facilities.

As far as not doing anything illegal or illicit the only people who say that and mean it have never worked with gov't intelligence community or are so boring that they aren't on my list of friends.

That's the biggest issue here Beestie, if you want to eliminate all kinds of crime . . . embed each piece of currency with an RFID tag. No more robberies, no more counterfiting, and (tin foil hat firmly in place) a handy way to track nearly everyone.

Slang, that's a straw man (though I'm pretty sure you knew that). The issue is not whether you are doing something wrong, the issue is information.

The issue for me is that I dont fit neatly into any catagory thought of as normal. Many of the things I do are strange but benign. Does everyone want to pop up on a thousand different lists of suspicous events,purchases and communications that some gov't bureaucrat lives to sift through and connect the dots from?

[conspiracist]Let the government connect the dots...they're probably doing it already anyway.[/conspiracist]

In the abstract, it's no one's business what I do to whom as long as no one is harmed or has it done to them against their will.

I don't quite buy it.

What if I loan my jacket to a friend to cover his .44? Will that tag register all his unlogged tags to ME? or will all his logged tags re-register my jacket to HIM? Or will that transposition of tags bollix up the system? Or perhaps will that transfer log HIM to ME?

That could get too complicated to administer. I'll buy the inventory control stuff...I can see that. But once *I* have it, who is to say I don't remove/disable that tag? A blast in the microwave should do it.

Don't panic just yet.

Brian

Yes, I agree. But some unusual circumstance will present itself and the answer will be something like " we could have saved Carly Brucia's life.....if only we had this new system of monitoring every move of every citizen"

Dont forget that much of the info that the gov't collects may not be used immediately but may very well be integrated into some future system........for the sake of the children ( or nowdays for the sake of catching terrorists ).

So for the time being, the tags will be vulnerable to some form of destruction, like the microwave, but then there will be some "visible and emotional" case where someone used this technique and (fill in the blank with whatever horrible act you choose) then loop will be closed.

But hey, thats just my opinion and we all know what a nut I am.

We're on the edge of another technological revolution, and fears of big brother, the mark of the beast, the demise of professional baseball, barcoding and armies of cloned (insert rogue nation here) always accompany these.

I get nervous too, but I just don't see any way around it. We grow too fast for our own good.

EDIT: About 3 seconds after I posted this, 74 copies of IE opened on my desktop. I couldn't stop them no matter how fast I closed them.

I shit you not

F**k.

I don't even like to cuss

[tinfoil hat the f**k ON]

:eek:

edit 2: took out f-bombs. But seriously, what just happened? I have MSN 9, could it be a glitch?

Besides, there's some stuff you just can't microwave ...

Unless you want to buy a new nuke-o-matic every week.

Hello, UN conspiracy IT dept? Yes the IE spam program on MrNoodle is working fine. Nice work.

Now, is the subliminal "vote Dem" program available to covertly install into his machine? Great.

This Kofi guy is really giving me a run for the money. Maybe I should send the boy down to re-establish some seniority.

Anyway.......................does anyone think the RFID tech will not be abused to intrude on the little privacy we have left?