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I suppose it's possible, but to my knowledge, smart dust still suffers from two problems that limit its effectiveness: power and range. It needs a power source, and so far as I know, there hasn't been a good solution. There's been work on photovoltaic sources and on electrostatic sources, but I'm not aware of any breakthroughs yet. And even if a power source is found, the devices can't radiate much RF power because that would quickly drain it. Smart dust is designed to network to its neighbors and extend the range that way, but if you sprinkled it on somebody and he walked off, he'd quickly carry the dust out of range of its neighbors. I imagine you could drop the stuff over a large area, so that there would always be neighbors, but it seems unlikely that you'd have enough of it to be so profligate in the current level of development.

Interesting thought though. If it isn't being used in this way right now, I have no doubt that it's just a matter of time before it is. One scenario I foresee is that smart dust will eventually have video and GPS capability, and people will release it into the air to drift about. They'll have the ability to have live video from any place the dust drifts. It'll be like having a camera pretty much anywhere somebody wants one. Scary idea in many ways.

Shrinking the size of RFID stuff is limited to the size
of the antenna. The chip itself is tiny but it's not
effective to send and receive outside a few inches
without an antenna. That's why the tags on your shaving
cream looks like either a square patch or a strip.

"Magic dust" sounds more like the radioactive dust tracking the Soviets used to do.

"I suppose it's possible, but to my knowledge, smart dust still suffers from two problems that limit its effectiveness: power and range."

Thank you for your knowledgeable response. While I know less than you, I know enough about the technology to have had some skepticism in the back of my mind when I posted this article. Reading your response strongly crystallizes the vague feelings I had about it.

Yes, but...there are ways around that, or at least ways to utilize the RFID technology within the boundaries of its limitations.

For example, even though it would definitely be useful to track someone no matter were they go, at any time, how is this for a scenario.

You have RFID on someone in a known broad area, you can set up detectors at key points in and out (kind of like we did with the SOSUS system with Soviet Submarines) such as roads leading into and out of large urban areas.

That is not what smart dust is, as I am aware of it. Think of something akin to a very small barcode. You just hit it with an infrared laser and read the code, just like a souped up version of the one in your supermarket. This does require visual contact, but could work over a range of several hundred yards.