RFID TECHNOLOGY WILL BRING PERSONAL SPACE, TASTES UNDER CONSTANT SCRUTINY BY ANONYMOUS WATCHERS

Radio Frequency ID chips (RFID) are an increasingly popular technology for commercial and security application. They are used to provide information to those who need to check the provenance of an object or the identity of a person or that person's belongings. "Supply chain efficiency" is the great cause they take on, but their real commercial potential lies in the way they can be used to aggregate information and identify tastes and market trends.

It is believed that RFID will soon be commonly used as a way of assisting marketers in providing "personalized" advertising to people, by matching —for instance— the constant presence of a cereal brand in a home, with that family's address, then sending related information via mail, e-mail or telemarketing. When we sit back to think of the implications, these "tags" could be emitting signals at all times, from quiet corners of our homes, providing invisible voyeurs with a dense fabric of information about our habits, tastes, even reading material.

Wired reports "RFID-enabled refrigerators could warn about expired milk, generate weekly shopping lists, even send signals to your interactive TV, so that you see 'personalized' commercials for foods you have a history of buying. Sniffers in your microwave might read a chip-equipped TV dinner and cook it without instruction." But such tags could combine with other tagged items to provide an all-too-intimate portrait of life in a given home.

For one, commercial items may be linked to credit cards or bank cards, jeopardizing the security of these vital accounts, and putting consumers at enhanced risk of identity theft. They might also facilitate the harvesting of time stamps, in which case information about one's movements and schedule would be scooped up along with other data (though in most cases, this information would be useless white noise).

Governments could use the technology as a way to gain access to information that would traditionally be subject to Constitutionally mandated judicial warrants and warranted searches. The slide away from evidence-based prosecution (in which evidence must be available before personal materials are seized), could jeopardize the basic liberties on which a free system is based.

Corporate-government collaboration in the area of in-home-spying is not fantasy: reference the NSA wiretapping program, which violated federal legal constraints by not using warrants, and the complicity of major telecoms in carrying out the illegal wiretapping, which allegedly affected millions of innocent citizens.

Also according to Wired, "With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, says Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department."

There are many reassuring words put out by the institutions that want to implement these technologies, often major distribution networks or chain stores. For instance, the claim is often made that privacy is not under threat, because most RFID chips for commercial uses will carry only item-specific data, like a bar-code does, and would not be able to identify the consumer personally.

But, the US Government Accountability Office found in a 2005 report that "once a tagged item is associated with a particular individual, personally identifiable information can be obtained and then aggregated to develop a profile". So, while corporations may have a vested interest in keeping customer data private, the government may find the more intrusive applications of the technology a convenient way to circumvent important Constitutional procedures regarding personal documents, information and property.

• Wired: "Microchips Everywhere: a Future Vision"
• Malaysia Star: "Microtag to launch RFID tracking device"
• Sentido.tv: "DATA SHADOWS & IMPROBABLE CONSENT"
• Sentido.tv: "US STATE DEPT. MANDATES NEW PASSPORTS WILL CONTAIN RFID TRACKING CHIPS"
• Sentido.tv: "IS YOUR CEREAL BROADCASTING YOUR SECRETS?"