4/5/06

Check this out-Big Brother

Tri-O's oddities, observations, and opinions
by Herb Kandel

Remember the joke that was widely distributed on the internet and was later given a public domain on the TV program “ER”? The doctor is telling an obviously inebriated and disheveled man, “I need a blood, urine , and stool specimen”, to which the man slurs, “Just take my shorts”. ..............................Yessirree!
That’s a one stop solution for multiple information. And most of us carry a similar type of multi-informational item on our key chains. It’s called a loyalty card that is swiped at your favorite supermarket, drugstore, or other specialty retail store to receive discounts. This information feeds a database that details everything you buy.
The information, of course, is used for inventory control, to attract shoppers, and to provide frequent customers rewards/incentives. But suppose the supermarket became associated with, or sold those findings to, an insurance company. Their actuaries would love to check the level of your cholesterol by gauging how much eggs and bacon you buy, to better predict with greater accuracy your risk of heart disease, to then adjust the premium you pay. Far-fetched? Well in 2001, the New England supermarket chain Stop & Shop, tested such a program. It was discontinued soon afterward but it had been intended to use customers’ purchases to create a nutritional profile. It would let you know if you needed more fiber or were ingesting too much sodium, etc. According to an article in the Denver University Law Review, a Stop & Shop executive admitted that the company had been considering partnering with “three or four” HMOs to use this data.
Do we ever fully know what happens with the personal information that we unwittingly supply to others.? And there is much more coming.
Consider radio frequency identification (RFID). It is a technology that uses tiny computer chips, some smaller than a pin head, to track items. Without wanting to encourage paranoia read this, “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.” They go on to say , “ 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.” The preceding quotes are from the book “SPYCHIPS - How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID” by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre. They are self described “suburban moms who've taken on some of the largest corporations in the world” to oppose the proliferation of RFID.
The RFID can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person. Some current applications of the RFID are: use in cars to automatically pay tolls; in ankle cuffs (ask Martha Stewart); for dog and cattle ID’s; Wal-Mart has its top one hundred suppliers affix RFID tags to crates and pallets as do Target, and Best Buy; the Food and Drug Administration has also approved the use of RFID implants the size of a rice grain for managing patient medical records; P&G had tested the chip in a lipstick product as had Gillette in Mach3 razor blades.
Now consider the future: the U.S. Postal Service can embed postage stamps that would enable point-to-point tracking; embedded cars, clothing, and shoes would tell where you are and were; RFID packaging for items consumed and later trashed would give a tell-tale picture of your lifestyle and habits by a car scanning the area with a reader; your “smart” refrigerator would tell you (and also the manufacturer) when tagged items have expired ; they would replace UPC codes and checkout cashiers - as the basket passes the reader all the items will be tallied and charged to your RFID credit/debit card which received the itemized information.
Many states have legislation pending limiting RFID usage. Some require a conspicuous label on consumer items with RFID disclosing existence of the tag and that it can transmit a unique ID before and after purchase. In Utah it amends computer crime law to include RFID. And to add a headache to this there can be hackers who perform illicit tracking of tags (tags which are world-readable pose a risk to both personal location privacy and corporate/military security).
In light of the coming age of RFID we may no longer be living in a house with walls but rather with surrounding windows....................... Yessirree!