The Times: Tech column - RFID tracking/virus writers
By David Rowan
IMAGINE a world where everyday items, from the jeans you are wearing to the banknotes in your pocket, are fitted with tiny radio transmitters that can be monitored from a distance to track your movements. Whether you are out shopping or driving to work, each item could be signalling your presence to a network of electronic receivers - allowing marketers, the police, perhaps even burglars, to build up unprecedented patterns of information about you without your knowledge.
If this sounds rather far-fetched - a combination of 1984 and Minority Report - then let me tell you about a new generation of "smart tags" that is about to hit the British high street. The transmitters, microchips as small as a grain of sand, are known as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and retailers hope that they will replace barcodes as a cheap, efficient means of tracking stock. The chips store large amounts of product information, which is sent wirelessly to a receiving station each time they receive an automated prompt.
As the price of these chips falls to just a few pence, companies such as Procter & Gamble and Marks & Spencer are looking to embed them in a vast range of everyday products. Gillette is buying 500 million of them, Michelin is building them into its tyres, and the European Central Bank is even reportedly planning to fit them into all new banknotes from 2005. But what worries privacy activists is the uses that these chips, each with its unique identifier, could be put to once they leave stores.
Unless the tags are made inactive, critics argue, any person or agency could continue to track their movements using commercially available RFID detectors.
Consumer groups are starting to warn that the chips could promote "oppressive surveillance" by manufacturers, retailers, even lawenforcement agencies. They say that if a banknote can carry its own electronic history, then even cash transactions could be tracked within databases. The commentator Declan McCullagh warned recently that divorce cases could turn on a partner's RFID logs being subpoenaed to prove their whereabouts, while retailers could offer shoppers personalised deals at the cash register, based on information extracted from tags built into previously bought clothes.
Like many new technologies, RFID tags offer huge potential benefits to consumers and businesses. But we urgently need manufacturers, retailers and the Government to develop guidelines on how their data may be used - because soon, billions of tiny chips will be saying more about us than cash ever can.
++++
THE TWO-YEAR jail sentence imposed last week on Simon Vallor, the Welsh computervirus writer, has polarised opinion - with anti-virus firms talking up the seriousness of his crimes (from which only their products could offer protection, naturally). But will the sentence really be a strong disincentive to others, as Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, hoped? According to Sarah Gordon, a specialist in the field who has interviewed virus-writers for a decade, high-profile legal actions do little to deter others - and in some cases even encourage them.
She interviewed participants at a hacker conference about the impact of legislation, and found that "even the people who didn't think it was cool to mess with viruses said that if someone told them they couldn't do it, they would be more likely to do it". Virus-writers, she found, are mostly young men aged 14 to 24 who "feel a right" to write these viruses.
The solution, she says, is to make them see their hobby as "uncool" - a challenge beyond a simple court judgment.
(The Times, January 28 2003)
IMAGINE a world where everyday items, from the jeans you are wearing to the banknotes in your pocket, are fitted with tiny radio transmitters that can be monitored from a distance to track your movements. Whether you are out shopping or driving to work, each item could be signalling your presence to a network of electronic receivers - allowing marketers, the police, perhaps even burglars, to build up unprecedented patterns of information about you without your knowledge.
If this sounds rather far-fetched - a combination of 1984 and Minority Report - then let me tell you about a new generation of "smart tags" that is about to hit the British high street. The transmitters, microchips as small as a grain of sand, are known as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and retailers hope that they will replace barcodes as a cheap, efficient means of tracking stock. The chips store large amounts of product information, which is sent wirelessly to a receiving station each time they receive an automated prompt.
As the price of these chips falls to just a few pence, companies such as Procter & Gamble and Marks & Spencer are looking to embed them in a vast range of everyday products. Gillette is buying 500 million of them, Michelin is building them into its tyres, and the European Central Bank is even reportedly planning to fit them into all new banknotes from 2005. But what worries privacy activists is the uses that these chips, each with its unique identifier, could be put to once they leave stores.
Unless the tags are made inactive, critics argue, any person or agency could continue to track their movements using commercially available RFID detectors.
Consumer groups are starting to warn that the chips could promote "oppressive surveillance" by manufacturers, retailers, even lawenforcement agencies. They say that if a banknote can carry its own electronic history, then even cash transactions could be tracked within databases. The commentator Declan McCullagh warned recently that divorce cases could turn on a partner's RFID logs being subpoenaed to prove their whereabouts, while retailers could offer shoppers personalised deals at the cash register, based on information extracted from tags built into previously bought clothes.
Like many new technologies, RFID tags offer huge potential benefits to consumers and businesses. But we urgently need manufacturers, retailers and the Government to develop guidelines on how their data may be used - because soon, billions of tiny chips will be saying more about us than cash ever can.
++++
THE TWO-YEAR jail sentence imposed last week on Simon Vallor, the Welsh computervirus writer, has polarised opinion - with anti-virus firms talking up the seriousness of his crimes (from which only their products could offer protection, naturally). But will the sentence really be a strong disincentive to others, as Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, hoped? According to Sarah Gordon, a specialist in the field who has interviewed virus-writers for a decade, high-profile legal actions do little to deter others - and in some cases even encourage them.
She interviewed participants at a hacker conference about the impact of legislation, and found that "even the people who didn't think it was cool to mess with viruses said that if someone told them they couldn't do it, they would be more likely to do it". Virus-writers, she found, are mostly young men aged 14 to 24 who "feel a right" to write these viruses.
The solution, she says, is to make them see their hobby as "uncool" - a challenge beyond a simple court judgment.
(The Times, January 28 2003)
<< Home