Alarm over shopping radio tags [BBC]
Supermarkets are now introducing a new technology that some say threatens a fundamental invasion of our privacy: the RFID tag, or radio frequency ID tag.
These smart labels consist of a tiny chip surrounded by a coiled antenna.
The technology has attracted [plenty of] criticism.
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf says: "What everybody worries about is that these identifiers will be used not to keep track of the object, but of the person associated with the object and then there’s a Big Brother scenario that everybody worries about."
"But when the economics get to the point where the readers are inexpensive and the chips are inexpensive, then you start to ask yourself who has the ability to read the chips and what do they do with the information?"
Former Australian privacy commissioner Malcolm Crompton says: "If done wrongly, it really is possible that I can buy things in one shop and be tracked in another shop, that the data, once collected, stays there for someone to come in and collect and use under circumstances that I don’t know about or that I don’t approve of."
"I think that is when society is on a slippery slope."
