Big Brother worries on RFID

Indy­Media: Wake Up! Wake Up! It’s Yer Chips With Every­thing. A Tesco in Cam­bridge (UK) has had to with­draw a trial plac­ing RFID tags in Gillette razor blades after mas­sive protests. While going full big brother at their trial, tak­ing snap­shots of every­one reach­ing for a pack of razor blades, under­stand­ably scar­ing peo­ple, this case raises the impor­tant dis­cus­sion where exactly to put tags, prod­uct or pack­ag­ing. Cus­tomiza­tion and 1-to-1 com­mu­ni­ca­tion require some sort of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, per­sonal or not–the chal­lenge here is to limit the pos­si­bil­ity of being mon­i­tored with­out con­sent and being tar­geted by all sorts of happy sales peo­ple. I’m get­ting enough spam as is, no need to take this into the pub­lic space, mak­ing my cell­phone go crazy as soon as I enter a super­mar­ket, pass by the new model of the car I’m dri­ving or walk by a brothel wear­ing my ‘Slut’-shirt. RFID has huge poten­tial, let’s make an effort to use this for the com­mon good and not let this be con­trolled by the next gen­er­a­tion spammers.