No doubt the above question has been asked many times by many people:
why promote a technology that we've done without for so long, and that
seems to scare a lot of people? Do we really need it? Is there a
political agenda? Something else? Mark Roberti, founder and editor of
RFID Journal weighs on why he promotes RFID, and highlights some of the abuse he takes because of it, mostly by email.
His
main statement that seems to get a lot of not so delightful email is
his belief that consumer concerns of a future Big Brother-like society
based on RFID is overblown. His other statement that gets negative
response is in saying that some people - namely Katherine Albrecht,
founder of CASPIAN - are hyping the concerns for their own agendas,
some of which may be religious. On the other hand, there are respected
doctors, like Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, who
willingly allowed himself to be implanted with an RFID chip to prove a point as well as to get a perspective for standards and privacy.
Roberti points out that he has often brought up legitimate privacy and security issues related to RFID, at the RFID Journal
website, and thus feels he has not downplayed the concerns. But he
believes that the industry would suffer greatly were any company,
particularly retailers, were found to be abusing privacy rights. His
own business, the magazine, would suffer as well.
While that may
be true - and note that this is the first time I am disagreeing with
him - that stance in itself is hardly proof that RFID is not being
abused or that will not be abused. VeriChip Corp. wants to implant RFID chips
into people and has even recommended it for US soliders, the terminally
ill, migrant/ visiting workers, etc. I've been writing about privacy
and technologies like RFID and smartcards since 1991. Rational,
professional, well-respected - and somewhat powerful - people in the
know have indicated to me that there has been agenda to tag humans for
at least 20 years, emanating from a group in - of all places -
California - a state that recently has had a lot of discussions in
state Senate about RFID, and have decided to encrypt RFID data on smart id cards.
I like to live by the principle of Occam's Razor.
It's something I've learned to do over time. But both my logic and
intuition tell me that there really are people who want to tag all of
us, though not necessarily for control purposes, just commerce. My
science background says that it's possible, and my imagination
unfortunately agrees. (There's a saying someone taught me a long time
ago: If something is possible, it's probably, given enough time. If
something is probably, it's likely, given enough time.)
Think of
the fortune you would make if you were one of a handful of companies
who could concoct "legitimate" ways of persuading, forcing or even
scaring people - all of humanity - into being tagged. And while these
people may not want to control you per se, there are others without the
means of implementation who might just want to use the technology that
way. These two groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but
probably are. And of course there's the rest, who break down to into
several other groups, non of which have negative intentions for RFID.
I'm
a middle grounder. I think that RF technology is brilliant, with loads
of incredible applications that improve efficiency and potentially
reduce operating costs for businesses. But I also think that we have a
Pandora's box here, and not because of any religious affiliation. I do
not want that box opened, but I also don't want radio frequency
technology to go away. Thus, my own purpose for promoting the
technology is to make people aware of the parameters, to point out that
if there is a conspiracy, there is likely more than one, with
different, maybe even cross purposes. But mostly, I'm writing to
promote all the good, positive, useful applications of RFID. And there
really are a lot of them.