RFID AS SURVEILLANCE

At first glance, it may appear that RFID is not a serious tool for surveillance. Critics and vendors state that the surveillance concerns of groups such as CASPIAN and EPIC are overblown. They note, for example, that:

v Most chips are not designed to be self-powered, limiting their range and thus usefulness for tracking;

v Readers are not deployed in public places, nor are they likely to be;

v At present there are no plans for businesses to read each others’ chips, or for the state to monitor business’ chips

v Customers may simply make a habit of removing tags;

v There are no [clearly stated] plans to make tags inaccessible, so small as to be imperceptible, to require them for warranty service, or to make devices inoperable without them.

Yet, it is worthwhile noting that there are no guarantees that these “realities” will hold for the future. Indeed, there are several trends which appear to contradict these assurances, perhaps most notably that the chips will not get smaller, that readers will not become more prevalent, and that they will not become required and essentially integral to the operation of some devices. Since most chips use unencrypted protocols, the assertion that no one presently reads another’s tag does not preclude someone from attempting to do so, or a retailer from being able to read the tags of another retailer. Further, as seen below, claims that the information from RFID chips will not be linked to personal information gathered in other ways (such as through loyalty cards) either by business or government is naïve.

Rather, RFID tags have the potential to play the role of an essentially low-tech tracking device in a system of distributed mass surveillance. At present, such a system is uncoordinated and patchy. However, with only a slight shift in the present reality, a shift that is already occurring, RFID devices and their readers will form the infrastructure of a massive public surveillance architecture. Only by laying down clear legal ground rules now can consumers avoid a system to be deployed to track them.