Political Discussion of RFID

Filed in archive Privacy and Security on May 4, 2004

The Future Now blog quotes United States Senator Patrick Leahy's talk on RFID entitled "The dawn of Micro Monitoring:"

"The marriage of information-gathering technology with information storing technology, manipulated in increasingly sophisticated databases, is beginning to produce the defining privacy challenge of the information age. Modern databases, networks and the Internet allow us to easily collect, store, distribute and combine video, audio and other digital trails of our daily transactions. We are on the verge of a revolution in micro-monitoring-- the capability for the highly detailed, largely automatic, widespread surveillance of our daily lives."

Future Now believes Leahy's talk is an indication of how the political discussion about RFID will unfold, an opinion I agree with entirely.

This is exactly why the RFID industry groups, such as AIMGlobal and others, have to be well out in front and leading the industry in a positive direction, and not commit the mistakes of the nanotechnology industry.

Read Senator Leahy's speech on RFID -- it is a simple HTML page and a quick, easy read.