May 01, 2004

As Wal-Mart rolls out the new RFID labels on their products, should we be concerned about how easy it is to track someone by the items they purchase? At the moment there is no guaranteed way to turn an RFID tag off after purchase (apart from 'sploding it), so consumers are carrying around a pretty decent (maybe) tracking device. Then again, maybe it's better to keep them...?
posted by tracicle 20 years ago
  • What bugs me is how a technology that can be so intrusive to the general population's privacy is being deployed by private companies, with the 'better profits' mantra. And as always, it's when the child-caring, eldery-enabling, merchandise-stocks-streamlinin' technology falls into the wrong hands when things will get ugly. It helps companies' retail operation (cutting jobs, btw... mmhh)? Great. Just make sure the thing is deactivated at the store's exit, and that the item is clearly labeled ('This sweater has an RFID chip embedded which may or may not be detected by scanning equipment'). Of course, what's more likely is that Benetton's adpeople will make it cool & fashionable to be pinpointed and easily tagged. A decade ahead, and subdermal chips will be easily tolerated by the public.
  • Just carry a magnet. That'll fuck em up good and proper, I would have thought. (On a related note, with a suitably strong magnet you can cause a nice load of havoc - and permanent damage, too - in any office or high street shop. I wonder how long it will be before magnets become banned items. Soon, only the terrorists will have magnets...)
  • I thought of magnets too, dng, but apparently it won't work. Q: Will a magnet erase an RFID chip? A: No, the chips are not magnetically encoded. Running a magnet over the chip or using a tape eraser will not affect the chip.
  • Damn!
  • How about crunching a big old boot into it? Iron bar?
  • actually, depending on the frequency of the chip, that old tinfoil hat in your closet would work pretty well to block the signal
  • Oh, jeez. The $20 bill does not have a freakin' RFID chip in it. The smallest RFID tags are something like three inches. Now, I did run across news of a Hitachi prototype RFID chip that's 0.4x0.4 mm, a.) they won't be commercially available until late this year (so they wouldn't be in those old-style twenties), b.) for 50 cents a piece, c.) they have a range of a whopping 1 mm. Let's talk about range for a minute. I believe the current max is something like 15 feet (about 5 m). There are three ways to improve on that: 1.) Up the power of the scanner. This is problematic because there are legal limits to how much power one of these can put out. Eventually people will notice because their flesh will start cooking! 2.) Increase the size of the antenna, thus making it more noticeable and easier to disable. 3.) Improve the efficiency of the chip. I admit I don't know how much better they could get, but nothing I've read indicates that we are on the verge of a quantum leap in chip efficiency. Furthermore, the signal is distorted when near metal and water does a great job at absorbing the signal (so no subdermal chips in the forseeable future, sorry). That dude's bills probably caught on fire because of the tiny metal particles suspended in the ink to make them easier to machine-read. Stack $1000 (!!!) worth of bills together and it's conceivable that the heat from the interior bills would build up until they caught the paper on fire. That is, assuming he didn't fake the whole thing. That's not to say that there aren't privacy implications for RFID chips, but most are severely overblown and vastly optimistic about RFID technology improvements, IMO. I'm not particularly worried about a chip that can only be scanned from 1mm away being put into bills that already have machine-readable serial numbers on them, for example.
  • Ha! I just did an experiment. Take 50 pieces of roughly dollar-sized blank paper, stack them and microwave them. Guess what? After about a minute, I started smelling burning paper. The paper had burned right about in the center (near Jackson's eye, if they had been twenties). So you don't even need metallic in the paper to get it to burn in the microwave. You could even try it yourself, just watch over the proceedings so you don't burn your house down. That was pretty cool, actually. I should take pictures.
  • And a picture. Yes that's a toaster in the background. No, I did not put the paper in the toaster. Man, now my apartment smells like a bonfire.
  • Excellent sleuthing dirigibleman. I thought about this post all day. I had crazy big-brother/black helicopter nightmares. This may indeed be a boom for the supply-chain folks but readers placed in something as simple as a cell phone still make me feel all weird inside. Hold me.