RFID - Privacy and the Police State [View All]

[lostnfound]

With RFID, police will be able to walk around a protest with a scanner in their backpack and quickly compile a list of names of people present; detectives could tell when your car entered and exited the highway or pulled into a grocery store parking lot.

A fascinating (Pacifica) radio program (Radio Frequency Identification) the other night discussed these tracking devices, as small as a grain of sand, which will be embedded in clothing, shoes, food packaging, books, etc. Tires and shoes are among the first products targeted for widespread RFID use.

RFID will allow tracking of person's movements and compilation of huge amounts of data about them, for use by marketing people, government, etc. through billions of less-than-a-penny passive RFID tags and a plethora of less-than-$20 scanners used for many different purposes.

http://www.nocards.org/AutoID/overview.shtml
"Some have suggested that pill bottles in medicine cabinets be tagged with RFID devices to allow doctors to remotely monitor patient compliance with prescriptions. 33"

"people might balk at the thought of police using RFID to scan the contents of a car's trunk without needing to open it."

"The European Central Bank is quietly working to embed RFID tags in the fibers of Euro banknotes by 2005. 24 The tag would allow money to carry its own history by recording information about where it has been, thus giving governments and law enforcement agencies a means to literally "follow the money" in every transaction. 25"

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While searching I ran across an actual story of RFID being used at a "charter school" to record when students get to school in the morning. "In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office. Eventually he'd like to expand the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses."

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Thoughts?