RFID - Bad, and going to get ugly...
Following on my last post about RFID, a good friend of mine sent me this slashdot link which links to this article, from which the following quote comes:
" Why is this so scary? Because so many of us pay for
our purchases with credit or debit cards, which contain our names, addresses,
and other sensitive information. Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded
in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is
associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of
shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them
away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that
the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for
scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns
of individual consumers. "
As the title of the article puts it, "You need not
be paranoid to fear RFID".