It's an unfortunate reality that, when we IT professionals automate manual processes, some people may lose their jobs. As bad as that is, I've still never felt that our work had the potential to adversely affect the lives of everyone in our society, perhaps to virtually erase any notion of privacy and fundamentally alter our daily exercise of personal freedoms. But all that has changed because of one little book that I urge you to read.

It's called SpyChips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre. In it, the authors do a great job of documenting the subtitle's claim, which, unfortunately, is no exaggeration. They've exhaustively researched public patent applications, sifted through corporate publications, and attended industry trade shows. What they've found, to put it very mildly, is incredibly alarming.

For instance, medicine cabinets and toilets can track your inputs and your outputs and report them to your doctor or health insurance company. Refrigerators can tell your TV what commercials to show you, based on its contents. Soap dispensers at work can report employees to the boss for not washing their hands. Other (mis)uses involve strangers being able to "electronically frisk" the contents of your carry-on bag at the airport or briefcase on the subway as well as supermarkets and department stores charging higher prices to poor people and bargain-hunters. Nokia's working on a cell phone with an RFID reader that will let strangers identify you via the spychip in your credit cards and will tell where and when you bought everything you're wearing and carrying.

Even scarier are patents like IBM's for Person Tracking Devices, Gillette and Proctor & Gamble 's "store of the future" prototype in which floor tiles will have imbedded RFID readers to track you (via the chip in your shoes) and the goods you are carrying around. Verisign has human-implantable RFID chips that are already being used to secure the headquarters of the Mexican Attorney General's office and in bars in Colorado as a gimmick to make drink purchases easier. Worse still is another company with a "deeply implantable" chip, placed, say in your abdominal cavity. The chip can be put there so that runaway children who don't want to be tracked won't be able to dig them out, according to the company's patent application. And by the way, this chip is capable of emitting an electric jolt, which would be just perfect for zapping unruly prisoners, for instance.

I'm sure I sound like Chicken Little, and it all sounds so nefarious that it couldn't possibly be true; no Americans are so evil as to be plotting to track your every move. In fact, most of what the authors have uncovered is just a result of corporations' blind self-interest and government's misguided opinion that it knows what's best for us. Some RFID applications indeed might have some benefits to the consumers they are being foisted upon. But we all know what road it is that good intentions pave, and as usual this new technology is being unleashed on the world with nary a discussion of the Faustian bargain its purveyors are making for us. Certainly, if most of these technologists thought that what they were doing would lead to a police or surveillance state, then they'd never be doing it, right? I'm not sure who said it, but it's certainly true that it can be difficult to convince people of the truth when their salary depends on them not believing it.

But what is one to think when, according to the authors, one industry executive says he looks forward to the day when all new building construction (residential and commercial) automatically includes RFID readers? When uniform rental companies are already issuing uniforms with spychips inside them (without the knowledge of the wearers)? When some elementary schools are already tracking children in their buildings with RFID-tagged badges? When the government is adding spychips containing your name, date and country of birth, and photo on your passports and pushing for VIN chips for your car along with GPS transceivers for tracking them? When one industry executive thinks that tracking goods through the supply chain "extends all the way to the recycling center" (yes, some companies have plans to scan your trash cans!)? When there are plans afoot to put these things in your cash as well?

I received a new debit card from my bank recently, even though the old one was good for several more years. Why? The new one has a spychip called "Pay pass," like the Mobil Speedpass you may already carry along with your toll-booth pass. Mind you, I was not told that it contained one; that's part of the plan for consumer acceptance—stealth and the illusion that all of this will make our lives more convenient. Also, according to the book, RFID industry execs at an institute called the AutoID Center (then sponsored by Gillette and Proctor & Gamble and formerly run by MIT) have determined via their public relations studies that while consumers want nothing to do with these things, they also feel powerless to fight them. Maybe we realize what a slippery slope we're on.

Believe it or not, I've only touched on the full, ugly reality described in the book. But it ultimately leaves me with hope that concerned citizens and IT people like you and me can at the very least put some strong and sensible limits on this technology before it is forever too late. Perhaps Phillip Zimmerman, who invented "Pretty Good Privacy" encryption, put it the best when he said (to Congress in 1993), "When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the government to deploy those technologies."

John Chadwick is a software consultant in Ohio who worries about the future in his spare time. You can reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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