Stop spamming for hits on your blog. If you want to post it in FR, put it in the right category: Blogs and Blogging.
Or I’ll dart you from a helicopter and implant an RFID in yer butt.
It’s already here and moving ahead. RFID doesn’t infringe upon personal freedoms, people do.
Sort of like that “guns don’t kill people...” argument.
I happen to believe both of them BTW...
None ...
Maybe the fact that someone, somewhere, will have the ability to know everything you buy, eat, wear, drive, where you go, etc...and either tell or sell that info to someone else.
On the up side, I guess it will create lots of jobs...there will be a great need for people to manufacture the rfids, the monitoring devices, and the monitoring personnel themselves...all in some third world country.
What are you, Amish?
I'm only half-joking. Many years ago, I read a story in Wired Magazineabout the Amish to approach to technology. This later article casts more light.
Author Bruce Sterling made some contacts amongst the Amish, and revisited a few more times; i recommend searching the site for "bruce sterling contacts" (without the quotes). It really is interesting, at least to me.
They're not, as most outsiders assume (and I did), knee-jerk opposed to any new technology; they oppose luxuries, not practical necessities. They oppose telephones in homes, which they feel encourage people to stay inside and weaken a sense of community, but most communities have outdoor telephones. It's much more nuanced than I thought, and I encourage reading the articles.
Coming back to RFID, it certainly has great practical applications and potential for abuse. We already have credit bureaus, computer databases, surveillance technology, wiretaps, e-mail surveillance, GPS tracking, SPECTRE, COYOTE, TEMPEST, and all manner of other technology that can be abused. To me, sweating over RFID is worrying about closing the barn door when the horses are long gone.
I see some great possibilities for RFID. Embed tags in all prison uniforms, and you know where everyone is all the time. I wouldn't be difficult to automatically spot patterns of a suspiciously large number of people closing on the same locations, and thereby alert the COs to a potential riot. Soldiers with RFID could find wounded comrades more quickly.
Put an FRID in the bracelets they put on hospital patients, and you can track where anybody is all the time. Especially useful for elderly patients who tend to wander off.
On a more mundane level, you could go to a grocery store, grab a shopping cart with RFID and a small touch screen, tap in your shopping list, and get exact directions to where you can find the stuff you want. The collected data is tied to the cart, not to you, so no worries if you don't want the world to know you're buying herpes meds.
Or you could go to the airport, borrow a bare-bones PDA at the ticket counter, and get directions to your gate and up-to-the-second updates on your flight status. Hand it back at boarding.
I'm fine with it, with the right ethical and legal guidelines. First of all, no one should have an RFID tag on his person without an explicit notice (I'd make an exception for one planted under a legally-obtained warrant). That notice should include the specific uses for the data collected and have an opt-out option.
I wouldn't support implanting RFID in a human body. I wouldn't support its use in secret, with exceptions for criminal investigations under a warrant, same as with wiretaps, bugs, hidden cameras, and GPS tracking.
Add me to your ping list. You post really strange sh!t and some day I predict you are going to get zotted and I would like a chance for IBTZ.
Thanks for your attention to this.