RFID

There’s been a lot of debate lately about radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Supporters want to put them everywhere from grocery store labels to under your skin. My dad found an article about a guy who got one implanted to make his life easier. I sent him a long response on why I’m skeptical. I’ll just paste it here rather than retyping. Enjoy.

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Yeah, he did it himself a while ago: www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/04/interview_with_1.html

I’m curious to see how reliable these new tags are. I’m worried they’re going to be one of the biggest failures around. When I worked at [a major electronics chain], the alarm tags in the CD labels were essentially RFID tags, and we still had tons of theft. You could defeat them with aluminum foil, or shoplifters just cut ‘em off. We had a lot of false alarms, too. So many the employees — in every store I worked for — got “trained” out of checking them.

And guess what? A privacy advocate attended a convention where the ID tags all had RFID tags in them. He wrapped his badge in aluminum foil and it wouldn’t work.

These things only have a limited range, too, like maybe 30 feet. It’s purely dependent on the power of the reader; the chip is passive. One of the Mexican government leaders had one implanted in his arm, supposedly to help prevent kidnapping. Well, it’s not a GPS chip, so I don’t see how something with a 30-foot read range is going to help. And now that it made national news, the baddies know about it so maybe they’ll just carve up or cut off his arm.

Consider chipped pets. It doesn’t help you find the dog, it only helps find the owner if the dog is find. Mimi had a chip. If she were found — and taken to someone with a reader — the address for the humane society would show up, and once they were contacted, they would call me. Doesn’t do me any good until someone actually gets her scanned (or if she’s already been hit by a car). Even if she’s stolen and taken to a vet. All the guy who took her has to say is “Oh, yeah, that’s where I got her.” The vet would probably have to be awfully suspicious

Some people have built longer readers, but you need to have line of sight on the target. It also puts out a fair amount of juice, so right now they’re more theoretical than practical. People are worried that criminals will make these and sweep houses, though, and see what kind of products show up. Or scan kids in schoolyards so they know which one to snatch. Or scan for passports (they’re experimenting with passports now) to find the right international targets. “Look, an American! Let’s get him.”

Criminals are just getting more creative, too. BMW put out a few cars in Eastern Europe that have biometric locks and starters (thumb scanners). This became MORE dangerous for the owners because now the criminals just waited in a nearby alley and then jumped them, beat the shit out of ‘em, and made ‘em open the car. One guy may have had his thumb cut off, if I remember right. and another guy was beaten so badly he died in the hospital. So that’s probably why we don’t see them here. But imagine that with RFID chips, people getting jumped and having their chips cut out, or worse, their hands cut off. A new wave of identity theft. Your window for crime is now limited only by the window between a murder and the discovery (and identification! - no more instant RFID read for the dead!) of the body.

On top of all that, you can make a unit that will fry an RFID chip for a couple bucks in electronic parts. You can disable your chips under your skin if you’re a privacy nut and live off the grid, or you can use it for shoplifting. Zap zap zap on a couple things and then carry a stick of gum through the reader so it looks like you bought something.

There’s a grocery store in Germany that’s gone all-RFID. They called it a success initially, mostly because it seems to work: people walk out with carts and everything gets rung up nicely. And they save money on having less register jockeys (which means people out of jobs — good luck getting that past a union like Jewel’s). However, I’m sure people will be keeping an eye on them long-term to see how it really goes.