RFID’s dark side
Malaysia
Star | September 22 2004
Think of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology
as barcoding’s next-generation: It is more intelligent and more flexible
than barcoding, being based on programmable electronic tags rather than little
black lines printed very close together.
It adds great convenience and safety to highway toll collections
and government services, and can help prevent catastrophic or lethal mistakes
in patient care at hospitals.
It has benefits in eliminating the need for human labour
in inventory control; providing information on the location and quantity of
inventory items, and their direction and speed of movement if those goods
were in motion; in reducing safety stock and finished goods inventories in
manufacturing; in managing equipment maintenance; and in the manufacture of
electronics components in clean-room environments, keeping the merchandise
away from human contamination.
But it also has a dark side, according to scientist Daniel
Munyan, who summed it up in a single observation.
The devices that read RFID tags are called readers, as you
would expect, but originally they had a more ominous name: “Interrogators,”
later changed for PR reasons.
The problem with RFID tags was that they broadcast all their
information indiscriminately to whichever reading device communicated with
them, Munyan pointed out.
Thus there was a serious issue of privacy and security for
people and organisations that owned that information.
RFID tag data was vulnerable to espionage.
“The information on my product shelf should go down
my supply chain, with no detours,” said Munyan, who is principal scientist
for automated identification technologies at Computer Sciences Corp (CSC).
He said the best way to ensure privacy and security was
to encrypt the data, so that it could not be read by unauthorised parties.
CSC was working with technology partners on developing encryption
for RFID tags, Munyan added.
Customers in a shop using RFID inventory tags on goods should
seek to know if the tags were being used only for theft control, he advised,
or to track customers on their way through the shop.
Retailers might do this to surreptitiously build up a database
of customer’ shopping habits for marketing purposes – an intrusion
into privacy that could help profits, but also risked offending those same
customers.
“Unless I’m using the information only for theft
control, I wouldn’t want to use it in a store or for credit card purchases,”
Munyan said.
He cited three factors that would shape the technology’s
future: “Legislation, lawsuits and boycotts.”
He said the latter two would be instituted by people who
felt their privacy had been invaded by inappropriate use of RFID tagging data,
which would bring about laws to curb misuses.
For a better understanding of the privacy issues involved,
Munyan suggested seeing the 1998 film Enemy of The State, in which a lawyer
played by Will Smith is tracked via satellite by the film’s villains
through devices embedded in his clothing.
The film made its points by exaggeration, Munyan noted,
but it has been shown by activists against this kind of intrusive electronic
tracking.
One problem in fighting RFID’s abuse by "bad
people" was that, as Munyan put it, “terrorists and criminals are
not FCC-compliant.”
(The FCC or Federal Communications Commission is the US
Government agency which regulates radio communications and thus RFID).
For instance, they might use RFID readers capable of communicating
with tags from a greater distance than that permitted by national regulations
allowed, for purposes of espionage or snooping.
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