How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID

[forrest]

"Imagine a world of no more privacy.

"Where your every purchase is monitored and recorded in a database, and your every belonging is numbered. Where someone many states away or perhaps in another country has a record of everything you have ever bought, of everything you have ever owned, of every item of clothing in your closet -- every pair of shoes. What's more, these items can even be tracked remotely.

"Once your every possession is recorded in a database and can be tracked, you can also be tracked and monitored remotely through the things you wear, carry and interact with every day.

"We may be standing on the brink of that terrifying world if global corporations and government agencies have their way. It's the world that Wal-Mart, Target, Gillette, Procter & Gamble, Kraft, IBM, and even the United States Postal Service want to usher in within the next ten years.

"It's the world of radio frequency identification.

"Radio frequency identification, RFID for short, is a technology that uses tiny computer chips -- some smaller than a grain of sand -- to track items at distance. If the master planners have their way, every object -- from shoes to cars -- will carry one of these tiny computer chips that can be used to spy on you without your knowledge or consent."

Those are the opening words of the book, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID." Today we are joined by one of the co-authors of "Spychips" - Liz McIntyre.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1447202&mode=thread&tid=25

[LIBRA]

What??

That just sounds stupid and not true. Why would the waste that much money to know what kinda t shirts I buy or whatever. Come on.

[toman]

RFID is not something to worry about, imo. Its just another way for the man to track things that they've been tracking for years, in order to do better business. It's no threat to personal privacy.

[PEACE FROG]

How bout that web site tracking thing.... anyone know what thats about?

[LIBRA]

RFID is not something to worry about, imo. Its just another way for the man to track things that they've been tracking for years, in order to do better business. It's no threat to personal privacy.



Damn the man, lol.

[OrganicGauntlet]

Got a cell phone? Satelite Radio? OnStar?

You're already being tracked, baby!

<breaks out the tin-foil hat>

[RAINFOREST MOONCLOUD]

Got a cell phone? Satelite Radio? OnStar?

You're already being tracked, baby!

<breaks out the tin-foil hat>

Canadian version :

Got semaphore flags? Carrier pigeons? Signalling mirror?

[OrganicGauntlet]

Canadian version :

Got semaphore flags? Carrier pigeons? Signalling mirror?


Funny, I don't recall mentioning anything about Canada.

[RAINFOREST MOONCLOUD]

Funny, I don't recall mentioning anything about Canada.

Well, we know you are from North America, and since you use dollars that narrows it down it down a lot. Now, your spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax and sentence construction are far too good for you to be a Septic – Q.E.D., you are Canadian. Eh?

[forrest]

It's leading toward this!

10/13/2004
FDA approves implanted RFID chip for humans
In the category of unbelievably bad ideas that we all knew were making their way toward reality whether we like it or not comes the news the FDA has just approved VeriChip's implantable RFID chips for use in humans. These are the same chips that we're currently using to identify our pets. VeriChip is touting the chips' medical applications, as a way of potentially saving lives by storing medical data.

Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code — similar to the identifying UPC code on products sold in retail stores — that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over the chip. At the doctor's office those codes stamped onto chips, once scanned, would reveal such information as a patient's allergies and prior treatments.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041013-4305.html

Take Two RFIDs and ..........

We wrote a couple of weeks ago about the coming age of micro tracking devices, the size of a grain of rice, small enough to.... well, small enough to swallow without knowing. <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0130824/2004/02/06.html#a45" RFID's: Get Ready for Your Own Personal Jammer</a> . But no, not even in our own radical proposal for the need for your own personal jamming system did we predict that someone would seriously propose embedding a micro radio transmitter on a chip into every pharmaceutical product.
http://www.dymaxionweb.com/dymaxionweb/archives/cat_rfids.html

[toman]

Seriously, big deal. For one thing, RFIDs can only be scanned within like three inches. Secondly, the amount of information they can contain is tiny. Lastly, the simple implantation technology is highly unreliable; most RFIDs and other un-anchored subdermal implants that size migrate so far that they can't be found within a year, making them completely useless. It's this kind of irrational paranoia about technology that is going to hold those of us with open minds back from improving our lifestyles through the use of implantable technology, when we should be concerned with what the government is doing to our bodies and minds with the food a pharmeceuticals they're feeding us.

[UnderTheRainbow]

Hey. Stoppit, I'm Canadian. :p Whatever.
They don't scare me. Big Brother is watching. Always has been, always will be. Who cares? They can track me, my fiance, everything we own, our vehicles, our house, our dogs... bottom line, you try to come into my house uninvited, hurt me or my fiance, or take anything we own, and our dogs will rip your face off before we even get a chance to kick your ass. Protect yourself and you don't have to give two shits about what the government is doing.

I'm not saying it's stupid to care. Worry all you want, but good luck changing it, with the way the government is going now. You can worry and stay closed up in your closet with your tin foil hat (haha, I've seriously considered making one and wandering down the middle of the street, mid-afternoon, just to see what people would do) or just say "Fuck 'em all" and protect yourself.