minorthird

I found this over at Mac’s.

Now, I love a good conspiracy, and I can get just a paranoid as the rest of you (I think I’m more paranoid…no, really…did you hear that?), however Lenore Skenazy’s piece just rubs me the wrong way.

And what if instead of a robber, it’s a private detective checking to see if you were cheating on your spouse last Sunday? You say you were home all day. But when the detective waves his RFID wand, the camera beeps, “I was purchased Sunday at Wal-Mart.”

Worried about something Ms. Skenazy?

Here are a few articles to balance things out — I’m not saying that Mac needs balancing, I just tend to take everything from the NY Daily News with a grain of salt and then use it for lining the birdcages of the world:

A Setback for RFID?

I can’t imagine that Benetton was planning to put readers around the entrances of its 5,000 shops to try to identify customers. It would cost probably $5 million for readers and then another $5 million or more for the IT infrastructure to be able to identify a tag and get information in the hands of a sales clerk (I’m being extremely conservative here). I’d like to see the study that shows a company would get a return on that investment.

Sex, Lies and RFID

And here’s a brief extract from an older item that ran in USA Today: “Embed an RF tag in every pair of glasses. You lose your glasses, you go to a special Web site, which listens the world over for a little ping from your glasses’ RF tag. The site shows that you left them on the bar at Thirsty’s.”

Who creates this “special Web site” and the global infrastructure needed to make it work? How does it make money? Nevermind. Those are trifling details that most reporters can’t be bothered with. But I have to say, I’m truly impressed with Thirsty’s. Here’s a small corner bar that is willing to invest perhaps $20,000 or $30,000 in RFID readers, network routers and servers, so that its customers can find their glasses. The lost and found at my local bar is a little plastic basket next to the cash register.

Is RFID Technology Easy to Foil?

RFID tags are already fairly ubiquitous: They are used by millions of people each day who hold their ID badges up to readers to access secure work sites and board public transportation. Many commuters on U.S. highways breeze past readers that pick up a unique signal from their cars’ RFID tags.

Many MIT students at the privacy workshop were also surprised to learn that their student ID tags contain RFID transponders.

Reading tags on individual store items will be tricky, however, and spies will find it hard to track items with handheld readers or those mounted in doorways. A sheet of aluminum foil is many times thicker than it needs to be to shield an RFID signal, said ThingMagic’s Reynolds. The signals are also disrupted by human flesh, which is made mostly of salt water: an RFID tag inside your fist cannot be read.

RFID tag systems, said Reynolds, also suffer from limited range. The readers — due to FCC tag power limits and design limitations on tag antenna sizes — work at distances up to about 20 meters. “In practice we see far less read range than that,” he said.

hey…it can happen. It will happen. It’s not going to happen soon. It’s just not cost-effective…

…we should be worried for when it is cost-effective…

…just not now…

…not that I have anything against everyone going commando…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2004 at 4:26 pm and is filed under people are retarded. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.