Packages May Soon Send Data on Consumers

Now we are paying people to follow us. I can't wait to see an antenea on my tampons.

Sanjay Sarma, the lead researcher at the Auto-ID Center in Massachusetts, says that by adding more functions to the chip, installing a battery and attaching a longer antenna, a receiver far away could read all the information on a chip, including its exact location.

So, one would have to add more functions, a battery, and an attena. Which could be broken off.

There are a lot of real privacy issues out there, but this one isn't.

However "longer Antenna" doesn't mean extern; it would still fit into a label. Even the Batteries don't need to be big - RFIDs need very little power, as they usually work passive.
And even the "normal" Rfids are not so easily dismissed:
Even if they are destroyed when exiting the store, the store does still know what is in your cart at any given moment.
It is even quite easy to map the carts to actual customers, allowing very direct advertisement (the things you pick up, but put back later for example).

This is meaningless. With security cameras they could do the same thing.

What's the range on these things?

it was discussed in another article, and they do not need to add batteries or an antenna to the RFID chip; all they need to do is use a more powerful transmitter or better receiver.

now imagine the govt put these transmitters and receivers on every traffic light and light pole. the same RFID chips that you say are "not" a real privacy issue, are half of a dandy surveillance system.

I said the placing of the chips in items in a store isn't a privacy issue.

By the same logic, should we ban security cameras because they pose a privacy threat?

The Organization Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) got access to 68 secret RFID lobby papers.
CASPIAN Homepage:
http://www.nocards.org/

German group hosting the documents (grab them, while they're still there - the page is English)
http://quintessenz.org/rfid-docs/cryptome.org/rfid-docs.htm

The article, that pointed me there (German):
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ola-08.07.03-003/

On Edit:
I wonder, if I should post this in GD, and/or if it has been posted there already? Hints?

Among the "confidential" documents available on the web site are slide shows discussing the need to "pacify" citizens who might question the wisdom of the Center's stated goal to tag and track every item on the planet, along with findings that 78% of surveyed consumers feel RFID is negative for privacy and 61% fear its health consequences.

PR firm Fleischman-Hillard's confidential "Managing External Communications" suggests a variety of strategies to help the Auto-ID Center "drive adoption" and "neutralize opposition," including the possibility of renaming the tracking devices "green tags." It also lists by name several key lawmakers, privacy advocates, and others whom it hopes to "bring into the Center's 'inner circle'".

Despite the overwhelming evidence of negative consumer attitudes toward RFID technology revealed in its internal documents, the Auto-ID Center hopes that consumers will be "apathetic" and "resign themselves to the inevitability of it" instead of acting on their concerns.

Thanks for reminding me; I had forgotten about it this Big Brother action. Although our data will be in the hands of corporate America, rather than the govt--wait a minute, aren't they one and the same now?

It's bad enough the CVS cards and supermarket cards let them know everything we buy; this sounds much more intrusive--and dangerous.

to get your prescriptions from particular pharmacies...CVS, for instance, for entire lists of people who are covered under a program.

(CVS, in fact, is the pharmacy where everyone covered by my local university, for instance, has to purchase their scripts in order to receive the full benefit.)

The world is going to hell because of the greed of a few motherfuckers.

...however, I suppose we shouldn't complain about big brother's 24/7 anal probe, right? at least here we're not trying to live on a buck a day and drink raw sewage if we can't afford to pay for corporate water....yet...

RF disablers. For home use only, of course.

BTW: Who owns the frequency spectrum that they use? We, the people, own it! The federal government allocates bandwidth - public domain bandwidth - in our name.

Will implanted prostheses, i.e., breast, butt, chin soon start chirping or speaking in that synthesized mono-tone speech like my "weather alert" radio, when they're recalled? Seriously, the damn thing has been going off every 15 minutes! Lions, and tigers, and bears - OH MY! (no LOL).

nobody's going to drive down the street and read these tags in your house. I've done a lot of research on this (for a potential product) and the max read distance that anyone has for the passive devices is about 1.5m. Even if they increase the range with a hot reciever or batteries or whatever, can you really see companies paying people to drive around and collect data? And in the stores they would get so many hits from all of the stuff on the shelves to tell what you have in your cart. The only place that they could easly track purchases is at the checkout, and the could do that now with your credit card/debit, ect. If you're really worried about it, you could jam them legally (I'm pretty sure on this one, most things have to accept signals from other sources) by making your own noise transmitter.

Maybe not Briarius, but why let the camel get his nose in the tent? It could go south from there. I've done some serious jamming in my day (ELINT and SIGINT on the Ho Chi Mihn trail) and I have the resources in my ham shack to neutralize any of these devices. I'd rather not. I'd rather just not have their shit in my home, no matter how weak the RF emissions.

You seem to know a lot about the technical issues around these RFID's. I'm assuming the worst and we'll soon have these little critters everywhere. How could I, as a consumer, de-louse my purchases, so to speak? For example, if I bought a t-shirt, could I microwave it for 10 sec's or something? Microwaves are cheap. I'd buy one specifically for this. Anything with metal (zippers) would obviously not work that way though. Any ideas? I'm just brainstorming here. :)

Let me guess, the military??