RFID tracking is Not the Problem

Filed in archive Privacy and Security on May 5, 2005

Engadget cites a Ubiks report about Omron's employee monitoring system. I quote from the Engadget article:

"This new bit of 'production management' technology in use by Japanese company Omron aims to squeeze every last morsel of productivity from you peons. It makes use of video cameras, security systems and mandatory RFID tags carried by employees to monitor everyone's whereabouts, analyze employee work performance, and eventually optimize employee allocation to improve product quality (why don't they just replace everyone with robots so we can all go home, already?)."

My thoughts about this? Taken in a vacuum, any kind of monitoring system sounds intrusive and scary. However, consumers have been rolling over and playing dead for all sorts of intrusive tracking for years.

Consider how much surveillance already goes on in the workplace. Security cameras, access cards, passwords for computer access, keycodes for copy machine usage, complete backups of email, monitoring of Internet usage, tracking of phone calls from landlines and company mobile phones, Onstar and GPS in company vehicles, etc.

And that's just in the workplace. In our personal lives there are credit card databases, Google search histories, store loyalty cards of all manner, car computers that can track your speed right before an accident -- you name it.

After that, RFID seems like an expensive afterthought compared to all the information out there about you.

How do you feel about RFID tracking?