December 29, 2006
Now Here's How To Track People With RFID
Wired's Quinn Norton writes about the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin, Germany, and how attendees are paying 10 euros each for an RFID badge that reports their location. There's an array of 35 monitoring stations that pick up badge locations and produce a constantly updated public XML feed.
The badges are part of an experiment and are voluntary, but it reflects exactly what I've been saying as to how RFID could be used to track people, given the right technical environment. There have been vocal naysayers here on this blog, but the CCC is proving exactly that it's possible. If you doubt me, consider that electronic civil liberties pioneer John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of EFF (Electronic Frontier Founddation), is talking at the CCC. One of this badge project's leaders also openly states:
The idea was most of this surveillance technology slowly faded into your lives, and we accepted them.... [we want to] make it possible to bring it into people's heads.
Meaning, if I've interpreted everything correctly, they want the general populace to be aware of what's going on and the potential misuse of RFID. Before you get your knickers in a knot, noticed I said potential, not actual. And that's all I've really been trying to do. Embrace the good, legit uses of RFID. Beware the questionable. You'll have to define the latter for yourself, but I partially define it as anything that violates a citizen's privacy and gives them no benefit whatsover.
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