RFID and Privacy

I realized this afternoon I needed to read up on RFID technology. The RFID Journal’s FAQ is a good starting place, though privacy concerns didn’t make the list. In fact, if you check the RFID Journal’s Security topic section, you’ll see that it only talks about using RFID to secure your merchandise (or children) and to prevent terrorism. No talk of securing the RFID signal against undesired snooping. And if that doesn’t bother you, how about the fact that Walmart is going to require its suppliers to RFID tag all of their pallets by January 1, 2005. This Time article from last year is just one source for that fact – you can find many more with a Google search – but I liked this one for a tangential reason: the explanation that the RFID developers pursued the technology because they were having trouble getting their robot to recognize objects and decided they liked the solution of just making every object in the world have an RFID tag so it could tell their robot what it is. That’s one way to redefine your problem, I guess, and it certainly falls on the “soft AI” side of the line.