What Are the Ethical Implications of Using Rfid Chips to Track Oneã¢â‚¬â„¢s Child

Informed Consent: Ethical Considerations of RFID

by : Dennis And Sally Bacchetta

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has incubated in relative obscurity for over 60 years, quietly changing our lives with scant attending exterior the applied science community. Beginning used to identify Centrolineal shipping in Earth War II, RFID is now well integrated in edifice security, transportation, fast food, wellness intendance and livestock management.

Proponents hail RFID as the next natural footstep in our technological evolution. Opponents forewarn of unprecedented privacy invasion and social command. Which is it? That's a bit like asking if Christopher Columbus was an intrepid visionary or a ruthless imperialist. It depends on your perspective. One affair is articulate: As RFID extends its roots into mutual civilisation we each bear responsibleness for tending its growth.

For Your Eyes Only

RFID functions as a network of microchip transponders and readers that enables the mainstream exchange of more — and more specific — data than always before. Every RFID transponder, or "smart tag", is encrypted with a unique electronic product code (EPC) that distinguishes the tagged item from any other in the world. "Smart tags" are provocatively designed with both read and write capabilities, which ways that each fourth dimension a reader retrieves an EPC from a tag, that retrieval becomes part of the EPC's dynamic history. This constant imprinting provides existent-time tracking of a tagged item at whatever point in its lifespan.

Recognizing the potential commercial benefits of the technology, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Engineering science (MIT) began developing retail applications of RFID in 1999. Install a reader in a display shelf and it becomes a "smart shelf". Network that with other readers throughout the store and you lot've got an impeccable record of customers interacting with products — from the shelf to the shopper; from the shopper to the cart; from the cart to the cashier, etc.

Proctor & Hazard, The Gillette Company and Wal-Mart were among the showtime to provide financial and empirical support to the project. Less than five years afterward RFID has eclipsed UPC bar coding as the next generation standard of inventory control and supply chain direction. RFID offers unparalleled inventory control at reduced labor costs; naturally the retail industry is excited.

Katherine Albrecht founded the consumer advocacy grouping CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) to educate consumers virtually the potential dangers of automated-identification applied science. She warns that "smart tags" — dubbed "spy chips" — increase retailer profits at the expense of consumer privacy.

RFID provides a continuous feed of our activities as nosotros peek, poke, squeeze and shake tagged items throughout the store. Advocacy groups consider this electronic play-past-play a treasure for corporate marketing and a tragedy for consumer privacy.

Albrecht's apprehension is understandable. However, shopping in any public venue is not private. It's public. The decision to be in a public space includes a tacit acknowledgement that i tin can be seen by others. That'south the difference betwixt the public world and the private globe.

What if those worlds collide? CASPIAN and other consumer groups are concerned nearly retailers using RFID to connect public activities with private information. Considering each EPC leaves a singular electronic footprint, linking each item of each transaction of each customer with personally identifying information, anyone with admission to the system can just follow the footprints to a dossier of the customer and their purchases.

Again, we must be clear. RFID does enable retailers to surveil consumers and link them with their purchasing histories. As disconcerting as that may be, it is neither new nor unique to RFID. Anyone who uses credit cards agrees to forfeit some degree of privacy for the privilege of buying now and paying later on. Credit card companies collect and retain your proper noun, accost, telephone and Social Security numbers. This personal information is used to track the date, time, location, items and price of every purchase made with the card?

Don't apply credit cards? Unless you lot pay with cash, someone is monitoring y'all too. The at present familiar UPC bar codes on nigh all consumer goods neatly catalogue the intimate details of all cheque and bank card purchases. Cash remains the terminal outpost for the would-be anonymous consumer. Of course, all things are subject to change. RFID inks may be coming soon to a currency near y'all, only that's a word for another day.

If RFID is no more intrusive than a curious fellow shopper or a ceiling mounted security camera, what is the downside for consumer groups? If RFID is no more revealing than a depository financial institution or credit carte du jour transaction, what is the upside for the corporate suits? In that location must be more.

Indeed, there is. Bear in mind that "smart tags" are uniquely designed to pinpoint tagged items anytime, anywhere from bespeak of origin through point of auction. And, theoretically, beyond.

Ah, the bang-up across. RFID's potential is limited only by our imaginations. And not simply our imaginations; the imagination of anyone who has a reader and a transponder. Wal-Mart. Your employer. The regime. Anyone.

Everything Costs Something

Members of German privacy group FOEBUD see shadowy strangers lurking in the imagination playground. Their February 2004 demonstration in forepart of Metro's RFID-rigged Hereafter Store was intended to enhance public sensation of the implications of RFID.

"Because the spy fries are not destroyed at the shop get out, they continue to be readable to any interested political party, such as other supermarkets, authorities, or anyone in possession of a reading device (bachelor to the general public)... The antennas used for reading are nonetheless visible in the Future Store, only soon they will be hidden in walls, doorways, railings, at petrol pumps anywhere. And we won't know anymore who is when or why spying on us, watching us, following each of our steps." 1

Freedom is Slavery

Dan Mullen would phone call that an overreaction. Mullen is the President of auto-identification consortium AIM Global. He cautions that unrealistic fearfulness tin can obscure the very real benefits of RFID: "Many of the concerns expressed by some of the advancement groups are frankly, inflated. The engineering tin be fix so that identifying information is associated with the item, non with the people interacting with the particular. Tracking individuals? That's not how the engineering is used."

When asked, "Could it be used that way?" Mullen was doubtful. "I don't think so. Not at this bespeak. And I don't see a benefit to anyone." Nosotros 'd like to recollect he's right, but someone plainly sees a benefit. RFID has been used exactly that mode.

Wal-Mart is ane of the retailers who accept tested photographic "smart shelves" in some of their U.S. stores. The technology did what it was supposed to do — photograph customers who removed tagged items from a display. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart didn't do what they were supposed to do. Goliath didn't tell David about the camera.

The well-nigh disturbing attribute of the project was Wal-Mart's emphatic denial that they had secretly photographed their customers. They weren't dislocated. They didn't make a mistake. They chose to lie. Information technology was but after Albrecht exposed the bear witness that Wal-Mart finally admitted conducting the pilot tests in an effort to combat shoplifting and employee theft. After all, the statement goes, this type of inventory shrinkage costs U.Southward. retailers as much every bit $32 billion each twelvemonth. 2 Don't feel too sorry for our friends in bluish. The bill for this hefty loss is passed on to you and me).

The public was unmoved by Wal-Mart'southward defence force, and the project has been aborted. At least for now. Wal-Mart's smiley face logo belies the airs wrought by its success, and we volition probable see the photographic "smart shelf" over again. Or it will see united states, anyway.

Wal-Mart is somewhat like a spoiled child, a casualty of indulgence, who is accustomed to doing quite what he wants when he wants to and rarely anything that he doesn't. It hardly seems fair to expect the kid to take "no" when he only vaguely recognizes the word, and even less so, it'southward finality

Bear in heed that RFID does not create opportunities for consumer profiling. We practice. Every time we enter a store we expose ourselves to scrutiny. Every time we purchase goods or utilize a service we are assimilated, Borg-similar, into the collective revenue stream. Everything costs something.

Worldwide spending on RFID is expected to top $3 billion by 2008, near triple the market of a year agone. iii Wal-Mart's prescript that its tiptop 100 suppliers must be RFID compliant by 2005 told the remainder of the globe to either get on the train or get off the runway. The U.South. Department of Defense force has since issued a like mandate, and falling technology prices coupled with the institution of compatible RFID advice standards are making it easier for other industries to practise the same.

The State of war on Drugs

Information technology's no longer enough to only say no to the schoolyard cleft jockeys. Nosotros have new enemies in the state of war on drugs. Our increasing reliance on chemical relief — born of a pervasive spiritual poverty as much equally our aging demographic— has fabricated us bonny to drug counterfeiters.

Counterfeit drugs are sub-potent or inert imposter pills that are channeled into the prescription drug pipeline and sold equally legitimate medication. The World Wellness Organization estimates that in less-adult countries as many as one-half of all prescription drugs dispensed are counterfeit. 4 The economical price to defrauded and dying consumers is staggering. And it is almost meaningless compared to the emotional cost.

In February 2004 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration'south Counterfeit Drug Chore Force released its written report "Combating Counterfeit Drugs". FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan directed the grouping'due south vi month review of America'south prescription drug channels.

Its conclusion? The supply of prescription drugs in the United states of america is overwhelmingly safe. The FDA'south complex system of regulatory oversight insures that with rare exception, the pills we pop take been manufactured to the highest standards of purity and potency, distributed safely and dispensed as the doctor ordered.

However, later on in the same written report McClellan warns that drug counterfeiters are better organized and more technologically sophisticated than ever before. According to McClellan, the FDA's current system can not run across the evolving challenges of the new century, and he recommends total-scale implementation of RFID technology past 2006. 5

Without question, RFID is a more formidable guardian than our present paper-based drug audit organisation. The savviest saboteur will discover RFID tags extremely hard to counterfeit and almost impossible to do so at a turn a profit. EPCs beget flawless accountability, which is a distinct impediment to illegal diversions and substitutions. And no incertitude every overworked, carpal tunnel-strained pharmacist would welcome RFID'due south promise of tighter inventory and simplified service.

Does this justify the enormous expense of a complete system overhaul? Practice the benefits outweigh the privacy concerns? Are you comfortable enlisting RFID in the battle confronting drug terrorism?

Before y'all decide, consider this: The FDA may incorporate "at least two types of anti-counterfeiting technologies into the packaging and labeling of all drugs, at the point of manufacture, with at to the lowest degree one of those technologies beingness covert (i.e., not fabricated public, and requiring special equipment or cognition for detection)..." 6

"Not made public, and requiring special equipment or knowledge for detection". Hmm... and so, RFID tags tin be hidden in our prescriptions without our cognition or consent... and we will exist unable to discover or remove them.

Consider, as well, that companies in the U.Due south., Canada, Sweden and Kingdom of denmark have developed electronic cicatrice packs that monitor pill removal and automatically notify the physician's computer when a patient has dispensed (or neglected to dispense) the medication as scheduled. 7

Hither's a improve idea. The FDA should explain how concealing information from me nigh my prescriptions makes the world a safer place. And then they can explain how spying on your medicine cabinet — and tattling to your md — thwarts drug counterfeiting.

The FDA'due south prime directive is to protect and advance the public health. They have done this remarkably well for over 140 years at an annual cost to taxpayers of only almost $3 per person. 8 When evaluating any policy change the FDA must always preserve that which is most cardinal to its success — indeed, its very existence — the public trust. RFID may testify vital for the connected integrity of our prescription drug pipeline, but never more than vital than the connected integrity of the FDA.

RFID is in its leap. These tiny chips, sown by science and nourished richly past corporate back up, will burgeon across imagination, penetrating our lives similar the roots of a willow. This is the time for soapbox. This is the time to shore our boundaries. If we cede the opportunity to deliberate, we take surveillance equally a norm. Our indifference will do cipher to stem its growth.

Endnotes
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3. Jennifer Maselli, "ABI:RFID Market place Poised for Growth," RFID Journal July 18,2003.
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5.
half dozen.
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viii.

Copyright ?2005 by Dennis and Sally Bacchetta. All rights reserved.

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