October 28, 2006
Can RFID Track People?
This is a debate that I cannot possibly settle, certainly not in a few paragraphs. But let me try. Some of my previous posts have "suggested" the possibility of tracking employees. They've drawn some heated comments as a result. I feel it's important to explain myself, not to save face but to explain exactly what I mean, and to prove, hypothetically, that is in fact possible to track people. However, I am talking of a very general form of tracking, which not only might not be in real-time, but would also be very rough.
To wit, consider this hypothetical scenario. Assume you have a closed environment, such as a large company that has RFID readers installed at doorway access points at regular intervals. Every employee is issued a contactless card that has an unique code. An employee leaves his cubicle to go somewhere, say lunch. The choices are the cafeteria at the far end of the giant complex, or out somewhere. In either case, the employee passes through two or three access points before his path diverges, depending on his destination. Each time through an access point, the time and the id of the card is logged. If the employee goes through more than one access point, which is likely, there is a log of his "trail". A very sparse log, but a log nonetheless. With that log, his boss can tell how long he took for lunch, whether he ate at the cafeteria, whether he stopped off at some lab along the way, etc., etc.
True, this isn't a real-time location system (RTLS), but it offers after-the-fact tracking of sorts, an employee trail, if you will. Guy J Kewney has a well-written post from March which says RFID is hard to get right, so don't worry about "imaginary Sci-Fi scenarios with Big Brother spies..." I respectfully say that while that may be true, it misses the point. RFID/ contactless technology does have the ability to give its controllers more information about you than maybe you want them to have. The question is, how will the information be used? Hopefully end users will be respectful with information they collect.
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