Asymmetrical Information

Stealing aside, doesn't the chashier also know what you've purchased from wal-mart?

Everyone knows that cor-porno-ations are eeeeeeeevil! Why should they be allowed to learn anything about us!?

You know those frequent shopper cards you can get from Duane Reade? I don't use them because I don't want them to have the right to track what I, Kate, purchase. On the other hand not waiting on line to pay a toll is such a blissful experience I am happy to use my EZ-Pass. Just try getting me for speeding.

I agree with you that the whole idea of people getting upset about this use of video cameras is silly, but if the purpose is really to catch the razor-stealing thugs, wouldn't it make more sense to put the camera there and then place a sign telling everyone that there is a hidden camera and all thiefs will be caught? I bet they would have much less of a problem with razor thefts.

Here is what the privacy people are on about:

http://www.aubreyturner.org/archives/002013.html#002013

Signs saying "you are being watched, don't attempt to steal" (or some euphemistic version of that) tend to irritate or disconcert honest customers, too. Better, from the store's point of view, to do it secretly.

As I work with RFIDs and designing systems to do massive data mining on the tracked results, I can see that you people really just don't have a clue as to what it does nor of what is capable of.

Well, John, then please tell us.

Well, for one, there's just the simple tracking of individuals. That, in itself, is alarming enough. The RFIDs continue to work long after the item has gone through the check out process. They don't have batteries, after all. The tracking doesn't stop at the checkout counter. Next, once you start compiling the trend data, you can make some absolutely amazing predictions of human behavior. The project I'm working on is predicting your likely DVD choices from the groceries you buy. We track what you purchase and do a lot of data mining on it, and use it as a nice service so the next time you come into the store, what you want is there waiting for you. We're having tremendous success with it. The point is, you're just focusing on the very trivial aspects of RFID and massive data analysis possible by tracking every seemingly insignificant move. Myself, I'm not particularly upset with such invasive surveillance. I've come to grips with it. But I think you're being incredibly naive as to what exactly you're exposing by such trivial items as what razors you buy, what you looked at on the shelf (smart shelfs can track not only what you buy, but what you are looking at while you're browsing as well). It's easy to make light of the trivial effect of a single grain of sand. However, it's the cumulative effect that is what this is all about. A grain of sand is trivial. Having 15 tons of it dumped on you is not so trivial.

Oh, and I should add that the current thinking is to embed RFID in cash - as a security mechanism - thus completely taking away the anonominity afforded by cash. Once this is done, it's going to be trivial to model the movement of cash throughout the whole system. And the real issue is that anyone can set up a system pretty darn easy to do this. Handheld RFID readers are pretty darn cheap. Sandwiches are easy to acquire and set up and very easy to disguise.

I guess I just don't think of it as particularly sinister. I don't really care whether Wal-Mart knows what shoes I'm wearing. Or what DVDs I like to buy.

I find it difficult to imagine that any model can "predict" my DVD purchases from my groceries. At best what you seem likely to get is gender/age/class demographics (ie, people of certain genders, ages and social classes tend to buy certain sets of products and also certain sorts of movies)... For that matter I find it somewhat difficult to imagine that anyone would wish to pay you to do such research, since I'm not sure how they expect to get any money out of it, unless they also get your name and address, and want to direct-market you DVDs.

I imagine the profit margin of that to be very close, overall, to simple direct marketing without the expensive data mining involved.

(PS. How does a "smart shelf" track the direction of my eyes? Dozens of cameras (after all, shelves are long, and cameras have limited view) and advanced software? Why do they care what I'm looking at, if it doesn't end up in my hands or my cart? What use is that data? "If we make the colors even more bright, people look more. Unfortunately, this had no effect on sales.")

Here's what I think is most remarkable about this story:

"Gillette Mach 3 blades, the world's most-stolen retail product"

Why is that?

Most of the people in question fail to see the importance of the WHO behind the surveillance.

For instance, I have no problem with tracking beacons in our cell phones or Wal-Mart's knowledge of my shaving habits but I do have a problem with King Mayor Daley II installing surveillance cameras in undisclosed locations (referred to as "hot spots") around Chicago in order to "prevent" crime.

Those Mach 3 razor blades are very expensive. They run over 12 bucks for a small refill pack of 3 or 4, that's slightly larger than the size of an old cassette tape. Most convenience stores have them behind a clerk's counter, where you can only get to them after paying.

The cost, combined with the ease in which they fit in an unprincipled palm make them such a likely target.

The problem is not that Wal-Mart can track what I buy at Wal-Mart that day.

The problem is that anyone can track what I bought anywhere at any time, ever.

RFIDs that stopped working when you left the store would be of no significance to privacy, but that's not what's on offer.
--G

The cited anti-theft example seems pretty harmless.

But if every time I walk into a movie theater or coffee shop, door scanners detected the wallet, pens, food, and clothes I carry and when and where I purchased them; that IS invasive!

RFID chips in money will create an instant market for devices (a la The Matrix) that can burn out an RFID chip without harming the bill, kind of like that spray you can put on your license plate to defeat red light cameras.

I'm not sure where I first heard the phrase "knowledge is power", but I tend to believe it. And I tend not to believe that most entities (either corporate or governmental) are particularly interested in my welfare. So I tend to bridle at the accumulation of knowledge directly about me.

Jane mentions that she doesn't care if Wal-Mart knows what she buys. I don't, either, but I get annoyed at the idea that Wal-Mart will tell anybody with a nickle what I buy. And (so far as I know) there are no laws stopping them. And everyone else will tell them. And then somebody data-mines, and decides that I like old Grateful Dead albums. Again, who cares? I might, if the RIAA decides that since I'm not actually buying them, I must be pirating them.

Should rfids be put in money, thieves will get hold of scanners. That will be swell -- at least muggers won't have to waste their time on people without cash. I always like to improve societal efficiency. Of course the scanners will be made illegal. That'll keep 'em out of the hands of criminals.

The incessant accumulation of information does bother me. I'm waiting for some lawyer somewhere to convince a judge that access to an opposition witness's buying habits is somehow necessary to his being able to offer his client a full defense. If you know enough about just about anybody, you can probably make them look bad.

And anybody relying on either the ethics of lawyers or the intelligence of judges to prevent it is, well, finish as you like.

And the collateral damage of wrong conclusions could be pretty severe. I suppose it's foolish of me to worry about the distant (5 years?) future when the Justice Department is correlating sales of stuffed animals to grown men against men without young female relatives. The resulting tag of "suspected pedophile" will never be applied erroneously, and will of course never become public.

And it's the ability to go from a store trying to reduce pilfering to that last paragraph in the space of one semi-coherent comment on a blog that makes privacy advocates so reflexively against things like rfid tags.

michael -- Ain't capitalism grand?

cks -- Thanks. I didn't realize they were so expensive. I'll stick to my Daisy disposables.

RFID chips are designed to dissipate the power in the antenna, so the chip won't burn out unless you have a pretty huge pulse. But I do agree with your central point. At issue is that if a cop sees you driving about with your license blocked out with paint, you just sent up a flag in his head. Likewise, someone using money with no detectable RFID signal, would be an outlier that would raise a big flag.

cks wrote:

>Those Mach 3 razor blades are very expensive. They run over 12 bucks for a small refill pack of 3 or 4, that's slightly larger than the
>size of an old cassette tape. Most convenience stores have them behind a clerk's counter, where you can only get to them after paying.
>
>The cost, combined with the ease in which they fit in an unprincipled palm make them such a likely target.

So why don't they just put them in bigger packages?

Strange things like ethnic foods divide large percentages of the population. Humans are brand animals, and what kinds of brands of food you buy tells quite a lot about you. 20 or so data points on what DVDs you bought and a classification bin based on what brand of olives you bought gives me a selection of DVDs you have a 60% chance of wanting to see. As to margins, its just a matter of turnover. If I have 60% of my inventory being rented out, I've just decreased the overhead of the entire process by a huge amount. Movement of inventory isn't free. Unwanted DVDs are just dead money if they aren't in the right place. If they're already there in Costco when you come in, then there's no need for direct marketing schemes.

As to how smartshelves can track your movements, think "loyalty card" (i.e. your Costco card, for example). Add an RFID chip to it (for your shopping convenience, of course) and I can track your movements all over the floor. Alternatively, I can track random sampling of items that already have a tags embedded as you walk around the store, and then later correlate the tracks with your id when you checkout. True, the system can't track your eye movements, but add cameras and we'll follow you all through the floor. When you take an item off the shelf, we'll store 10 seconds before and after you put it back. Since we have the physical map of all the items, mere humans can figure out what you were doing. If the humans are trained anthropologists, then they can figure out an amazing amount from regularly monitoring statistically driven samples.

But the point is, the surveillance will quickly become total. Surveillance by itself isn't good or bad, it's who is doing it. It's how it's done. This stuff has to be regulated in a (hopefully) sane fashion. If it's allowed to "work itself out", the result won't be pretty. There has to be protocols and regulations and penalties for breaking them in place. The discussion should be happening now, while it's still not wide spread. It will happen, but the good part about living right now is that we can decide how it evolves. The potential for abuse is enormous, but it certainly isn't destined to be abused.

Trivializing the issue as it stands today doesn't seem like a healthy attitude to have. It seems terribly naive to the implications.

Just like spying on countries, a little thing is meaningless, but put together thousand little things together and they mean a whole lot. The Soviets used to have someone watch airfields and simply count the planes that took off. By itself, it meant absolutely nothing that an F16 took off at 3:16PM. But aggregated over time they gained tremendous insight into capabilities.

Similarly, an organized crime unit would love to be able to buy a list of people who just bought expensive electronic items, bought plane tickets and checked into overseas hotel last night. With real time access they could greatly optimize their break-in schedules. It would also be nice if they could cross-reference that with a database of installed burglar alarms.

Each little invasion of privacy is not very important, but taken together there simply is no privacy.

Jane, I wouldn't take this quite so lightly. Maybe you're right, but it's a pretty serious issue and deserves serious thought. Remember the law of unintended consequences!

John is right: taken in total, massive data collection and data mining can be sinister indeed. 20-30 years from now (or maybe less), it's possible that corporations will literally be able to buy a dataset that tracks every single thing you've bought, every single place you've been, and every single person you've met. A little imagination should convince you that just maybe you don't want anybody to know quite this much about you.

What data does the actual little chip contain? The impression I was under is that they work like the little Mobil Speedpass things- the chip has a unique identifier that can then be compared to a database. If you haven't got the database, you don't have any information except a number. Am I wrong?

And at what distance do these things cease to accurately work?

And doesn't 'King' Daley's cameras have flashing blue lights and CHICAGO POLICE written on them?

fub-

The packaging is much larger than the product inside. Absent cameras, I suppose that there's no deterrent to thieves opening up the cardboard box. Inside the packaging, the tray that holds the razors is about the size of an old cassette tape.

As I mentioned, Mach 3 razor refills are almost always sold from behind a cashier or pharmacy counter, which seems like a less expensive solution to shoplifting than installation of extra RFID hardware.

I think that the real direction that RFID may be heading is toward the elimination of grocery store check-out, at least for non-produce and deli items. Once the receivers are good enough to tally up all the items in a shopping cart in a short time period, scanning every bar-code in each shopping cart will be unnecessary. No more 20 min waits in the checkout aisle at the grocery store.

There is no giant conspiracy here. Conspiracies are too expensive and too time consuming. Only bureaucrats have time for conspiracies.

This data is used to put goods on the shelf that people want to buy. It is also used to make sure the stores do not run out of goods that people want to buy.

The net effect of all of this data collection is a more satisfied customer and lower inventory carrying costs and lower prices.

I really don’t understand why people get upset about companies taking steps to only offer products that we want to buy. If you are in a paranoidal mood, get upset about all the information that the IRS collects on you. Now that scares even me.

"I guess I just don't think of it as particularly sinister. I don't really care whether Wal-Mart knows what shoes I'm wearing. Or what DVDs I like to buy."

I find one point quite confusing. I mean the following question only in purely friendly fashion, because I seriously amn't clear on how to reconcile the above with this: why is it, again, you post under a pseudonym these days, "Jane"?

I'm sure you're aware, of course, that if "Wal-Mart" has access to datamining all this cumulative information, which will continue to accumulate, and grow in detail and depth over the entire rest of your life, at least thousands, if not potentionally hundreds of thousands, if not more, individuals will have access to this information. Down to everything from your pattern of buying lingerie tied to your cycle of buying menstruation aids tied to your prescription drugs tied to your food buys tied to your taste in reading matter tied to your... etc., etc., etc. But why is someone unconcerned on, essentially, anyone who wants to know this information, publishing in (mildly) pseudonymous fashion?

Could you unpack this mystery, please?

RFIDs are passive devices, powered by the scanner transmitter. A wire mesh lining in my wallet, grounded by way, in part, of one of those trucker/biker wallet chains, should stop the thieves from scanning how much money I have. A microwave oven could surely be hacked to kill them.

CKS's comment about the automatic checkout that just scans your shopping to see what you've bought, is the really big idea. If you didn't have to stand in line... who would shop anywhere else?

"CKS's comment about the automatic checkout that just scans your shopping to see what you've bought, is the really big idea. If you didn't have to stand in line... who would shop anywhere else?"

- Posted by Patrick at July 24, 2003 11:29 PM

You still have to stand in line to use the scanner. Self-checkout is slightly quicker than the express line but I still dislike the idea. I don't want to bag my own groceries, or operate a scanner, or try to convince a slot to accept my bills -- or see a bunch of checkout people and baggers lose their jobs, for that matter.

Ok, so for everyone who thinks that rfid tags in stores means that we're about 20 years away from corporate big brother because of all the information that corporations will have on us: who here shops at amazon? Want to take a guess at how much information they can collect on you as you browse and search and read comments and introductory pages?

Want to guess how much every other online retailer can do the same thing? RFID tags are nearly a joke in comparison to what Amazon can (and largely does, actually) already do.

I suspect that what is going to happen in brick-and-mortar stores is what happened in online stores. Everyone is going to publish a privacy policy. Or it's not going to matter.

Yes, there exists great potential for abuse. As long as human beings are around each other, there always will be. The real trick is to prevent abuse from happening, not to panic at every opportunity. John is correct: we need to formulate the parameters for what can be done in our society so as to prevent abuse; not try to crush technology (or worry ourselves to death over it) merely because it has the potential for abuse.

Now, does anyone seriously think that if BaM stores adopted privacy policies like those of online stores that RFID tags are any worse than amazon looking through their HTTP logs?

Gary, Jane is just barely psuedononymous. Anyone who spends any time here at all knows her real name - it's not like it's a big secret. "Jane Galt" is more of a joke than anything else...

And I second her shrug: who really cares if people know what you buy? DO really think people are that interested? (and if you're really that concerned, fill out the application for the "club card" with false information - it's not like they check)

I'm one of those people who is growing to resent these "intrusions," though I know that taken individually, they are pretty meaningless. Every building I walk into in DC has metal detectors. Every store has video cameras. With greater reliance on credit and cash/check cards, banks keep track of every purchase I make. In order to get sale prices at Safeway and CVS, I need to use my Safeway card or CVS card, which allows those stores to track my purchases. It has reached the point that my only zone of privacy is the four walls of my home. I don't predict a Terminator 3 scenario where some super computer uses this data to kill us all, but it certainly makes identity theft more likely. Why do institutions need to keep track or monitor every aspect of my life?

More importantly, what if I just want to by a box of Gillette (sp?) blades and also pick my nose. Can't I be left alone to do that?

Here's a few things to bear in mind:

The range of the tag readers has increased tenfold in the past five years. If that happens again, I'll be able to read the contents of your house from across the street before deciding to rob it. The tags don't evaporate when you leave the store, after all.

Or consider it from the government's point of view: The set of tags a given person is carrying on a given day doesn't change that much -- you've got the tag in your shirt, the tag on the card in your wallet, the fifteen tags in your backpack, briefcase, or purse, and so on. Which means that anyone with a tag reader can track you from a nice long distance.

Again, if the tags evaporated when you left the store, there would be precisely no privacy implications. But it doesn't really work that way: By buying at Wal-Mart, you'll be "consenting" to be trackable anywhere and everywhere you ever go with anything you bought there.

Of course there's no conspiracy trying to impose these tags on us. But the possibilities for misuse are so great that the results are likely to be functionally indistinguishable from a conspiracy. One doesn't have to be a paranoid to dislike the idea of handing over to anyone with an RFID scanner the power to track people and objects anywhere forever -- that power's as bad in the hands of a stalker as in the hands of a government agent, as bad in the hands of a Big Shadowy Conspiracy as in the hands of the government.
--G

If you're "having a hard time worrying about this", then try using Microsoft Word to create an altered version of the article where the phrase "razor blade" (or other consumer durable) is replaced by "gun". Thus, "It will be possible to track exactly who is buying guns at any time, etc,etc"

anyone seen the ibm ad from 2 ish years ago?

scruffy guy, late at night, walks around a large drug store (walgreen's ish, with lots of food, toiletries, etc) stuffing his coat full.

he breezes through an arch and is about to walk outside when security guard yells at him to stop. guy stops and turns, security guard says "sir, you forgot your bill"

everything was totaled and paid for using rfid (i.e. product tags and a speedpass type card)

so, yeah, that'd be sweet. you only need to bag lots of stuff like at grocery store (since anything reasonably portable no longer needs a bag to prove you paid)

RFID will be implemented for one reason, and oen reason only. Perfect inventory. you ping your stores, your trucks, your boats, your containers, and your warehouses and you know exactly what's where, and how much that has changed in the past x amount of time.

if you think JIT as done by dell is impressive... every company everywhere is going to upgrade to perfect, full information on inventory. you can basically eliminate theft throughout the system, as well as losing goods or have them spoil.

then you can also vastly speed up checkout, allowing you to have only customer service people who can focus on up sell and improving customer service.

as for privacy... the whole point of most consumption these days is to shout from the rooftops exactly what you're buying and how much your worth/how cool you are. polo, hilfiger, dolce & gabban... why do you pay $50 for a black tshirt that says a|x vs 20 for a black t from bana republic? so you really care that people know what you buy

you have no privacy, you never did, but get over yourself. no one cares about you, so it doesn't matter

as for the nyms on this blog... google's forever, certain people's jobs can't have them appear to be advocating a position that may be construed as that of the firm they work for, certain public service jobs don't want you to have opinions in public, and under nyms we can say what we really think or what we want to be heard (i.e. bomb throwing) without having to walk around for the rest of our lives with any specific argument or view available in google.

I would imagine that if a market would spring up for criminals to scan the goods in your home for tags, a parallel market would spring up to allow you to scan the goods in your home for tags, and to disable or remove them to boot.

Why does everyone think that these tags are necessarily going to be inside of all goods themselves? Why not just bolted/taped on like the tags used for those theft-detector thingies like in the library (sorry, it's been a while since I slept).

Why can't the humidifier RFID tag be on the inside of the box, but not on the inside of the RFID tag? Why can't the RFID tag on the shirt be on a tag you can remove? The pringles RFID tag can be on the can, which you then throw out; the CD's RFID tag can be glued to the front (or just floating inside of the case) and easily removable after doing all of the difficult unwrapping.

The mere existence of RFID doesn't mean that it has to be permanent, nor does it mean that criminals will somehow have access to a complete database of every RFID tag ever made (assuming that none are ever made with overlapping data).

Don't worry about the baggers and checkers. They'll be employed analyzing all the data.

Chris,

Why does everyone think that these tags are necessarily going to be inside of all goods themselves? ...

Why can't the humidifier RFID tag be on the inside of the box, but not on the inside of the RFID tag? Why can't the RFID tag on the shirt be on a tag you can remove? The pringles RFID tag can be on the can, which you then throw out; the CD's RFID tag can be glued to the front (or just floating inside of the case) and easily removable after doing all of the difficult unwrapping.

They probably will be, to start with. But in the long run it would be more convenient for manufacturers to have it actually part of many products. If it's actually part of the shirt, the shirt can be tracked all the way from the factory, rather than only after the final retailer adds the tag. That helps with inventory control thoughout the chain. The rfid could be used to verify the purchase date of your humidifier, for warranty service. The serial number would work also, of course, but once rfids were used for inventory control, the serial number would have to be linked to the rfid signature, and (from the point of view of the seller) why have both? Especially since it creates another error source (mismatched rfid / serial number records).

The Pringles example isn't really in the same arena, since in the other cases you're talking about a permanent item, whereas potato chips are not.

There are probably also good reasons from the criminal investigation standpoint to have rfids permanently part of the item. Pawnshops would soon be required to scan all items offered to them, the signatures to be checked against a database of stolen items, perhaps.

And lots of reasons that don't occur to me right now.

chichka,

Well, in shirts, why not put the rfid tag in a tag in the shirt (along with the other tags now) that a buyer would presumable cut off at home? That would work fine and likely be far more convenient than trying to weave an RFID tag into an actual $4 T-shirt somewhere. Similar for more expensive shirts.

And will every sock in the 6-pack get its own RFID tag?

I just very much doubt that as a society we're going to allow ourselves to move to a universal inventory control system regulated by our government. It may happen, but I think it very unlikely. Even if it sneaks up on us, we're not the sort of country to just shrug our shoulders and not care; we address all sorts of problems despite there having snuck up on us. Polution issues, working conditions issues, even freedom of speech has been expanded greatly in the last 100 years, and none of those were new issues.

Chris,

In response to one thing you write:

Well, in shirts, why not put the rfid tag in a tag in the shirt (along with the other tags now) that a buyer would presumable cut off at home?

I think one of the early comments mentioned having washing machines that would "know" what clothes were put in, and would adjust temperature, et cetera, accordingly (does the washer just not work if the clothes have different nominal requirements?). And kitchens that keep track of what you have in the larder, and let you know when you're running out. Functions like that would require that tags stay with the products.

I think the point is that for various products, there might be various reasons to leave the tag on. I'm not creative enough to think of all of them, but give enough people enough time, and they'll manage.

A different point:

I just very much doubt that as a society we're going to allow ourselves to move to a universal inventory control system regulated by our government.

I don't think people are as worried about it being controlled by the government as they are about it not being controlled by the government. The articles I've read are mostly worrying about the information being available to corporations, and by extension to just about anyone. As mentioned in earlier posts, it's not that Wal-Mart knows what you buy at Wal-Mart, it's that anyone can know what you buy everywhere.

At least in the government, regulations can be put in place. Arnold Kling (http://www.corante.com/bottomline/)
has linked to some good stuff on this, both recently and over the past several months. His comments are always interesting.

I am worried about the government running things, as there is evidence that there is plenty of abuse of privelege in the various law enforcement agencies. I recall reading that the FBI falsified information on 79 surveillance applications to their FISA court over the past couple of years of the Clinton administration. The New York police department a few years ago was found to be trading criminal information to credit bureaus.

If the abuse of information is accompanied by increased convenience and saving for some (or most) people, there is likely to be a lot of difficulty in rolling it back. Here's a very unlikely example: My medical insurance company contracts with the retail information clearing house to be notified when I buy pants. If my waist size increases, they raise my rates, because obesity is associated with higher risks of just about everything. I may complain, but if younger people are getting lower rates, are they going to let this be legislated against?

The IRS would like to have all this information, because they could more easily find people who are hiding income. The IRS can be regulated and controlled. But if a private data mining corporation puts together a list of people with large amounts of disposable income, who have a habit of buying X class of product, and have little brand loyalty, and sells it to marketing firms, is that illegal? Not now. Is it wrong? I don't know. Is it creepy? It is to me.

By the way, to a small extent this already happens. I have been told that when doctors move to a new home, they get even more junk mail than most of us, because it is assumed that doctors have more disposable income.

Anyway, I think a lot of the reaction to things like rfid tags is due to (1) it feels creepy to a lot of people, and (2) it's often done in secret. I recall a lot of anger when people found out that their supermarket discount cards were being used to build buying histories, and that this information was being sold to a big firm in Florida. A lot of the anger was due to it having been secret. Certainly most people kept using their cards, so it wasn't enough to change their minds about the utility. But thwy hadn't been told, and it pissed them off.

It's probably too late, but I'd like to add one thing.

The real problem isn't that individual retailers will track your purchases and therefore be able to target ads at you better. That may be annoying for some of us, but that's all.

The real danger is that eventually all this information from *all* the retailers and *everyone else* who tracks information will be available for a fee from a central database. Think of it as a credit bureau on super-duper steroids.

I don't think it's feasible to fight the data collection, but I think it is feasible to legislate against sharing this kind of data. As long as it's all in separate databases, the danger to privacy is manageable. If not, it can get very scary very quickly.

So who IS Jane Galt? Ayn Rand, aside, why the mask? You all may think this blog is the center of the world and everyone is so inside that everyone knows who Jane Galt is, but, it's, fortunately, a big world and there are a few of us hicks who don't know. I think Ms/Mr Galt doesn't like being "out," but s/he doesn't appreciate the irony. I think I will track her for a few days and then PUBILICLY disseminate through the world-wide blog network all the info that I can gather on him/her. Let's see, what could we list from a good RFID tagged future world:
all Jane's investments
her children's schools
her sizes
all the high ticket items she buys
where she vacations, with whom
with whom she dines, when, where
every book she buys, movie she sees, video she rents, race she bets on,
cars she owns,
designer furniture puchases
hair dresser , hair colorist
amount of money in her wallet
number of times she uses the toilet
number of times she meets with ANYONE
tax returns
BANK ACCOUNT NUMBERS
property owned
value of all property
value of all purchases made last year, month, yesterday
number of times s/he had sex in her home
number of times s/he had sex any place but her home, with whom
with whom she is talking on the phone, right now
magazines subscribed to
charitable contributions
where s/he was last night and
what she wore (this is good technology for PAGE SIX. No?)
Jewlery owned, watches, and gems, or lack there of
all the digital photos she has ever taken
every building,national park, airport, taxi, plane, ship, truck, or train she has been on or in

every magazine she has every picked up and looked at,
every doctors office she has every been in
her psychiatrist's name,
all her medications
all her sporting equipment, her gym membership
what garage she parks in
where her car is at any moment
and for the future-future, what she is feeling at any given moment.

I know there are many things I did not include. Anyone wish to extend the list of personal information that Jane can anticipate being available for public dissemination, by those who may wish her ill? Just think, our own government just outted their own undercover CIA agent to teach a lesson to her husband. Just think how much more damage a guy like Edgar J. Hoover could have accomplished with some well placed RIFD tags. ho, boy.

So who IS Jane Galt?

A woman whose disguise is so fiendishly clever that you actually have to visit Instapundit -- a secretive and little-known political blog -- to discover that her name is Megan McArdle.

And I've love to know what RFID's have to do with knowing "number of times s/he had sex in her home"... maybe you're talking about condom purchases, but that's a weak correlation at best. :)

Denise: yes it is, indeed.
John: "At issue is that if a cop sees you driving about with your license blocked out with paint, you just sent up a flag in his head." Doesn't work that way. You can't see it with the eye, only the camera can see it.

Hmm, I see I'm a bit late to the party.

I don't see the RFIDs as a big problem anytime soon, because: if someone aims a super-sensitive reader at my house and tries to see what products I have, all the RFIDs will reply at once and it will be very hard to separate all their little electronic "I'm here"s. I can imagine some sort of scanning reader, but how well will that work on clothes all in a closet, or pill bottles in a medicine cabinet? The IBM ad that Hey mentions is way in the future; any time soon, you'd need to send each item thru a scanner sequentially.

I must admit, I frequently while away the hours wondering how often Jane uses the toilet... what, are we tagging water molecules with RFIDs? NYC doesn't even meter water in many places (I think this is supposed to be changing), so I seriously doubt we'll be learning this vital fact. Ditto with digital photos she doesn't have on a hard drive connected to the Internet, and cash purchases, rentals, bets.

John, if my money's RFID is burned out, "it must have been someone else who did it, officer." Can you expect every bank and every store to check every note before giving it out in change? And every note already has a unique serial number; how much time is spent tracking it?

Phil says "...a parallel market would spring up to allow you to scan the goods in your home for tags, and to disable or remove them to boot." Or there's be a simple RFID jammer you could buy which would prevent anyone outside your house from scanning the RFIDs in your stuff from a distance. (And internal RFID scanners, ie the smart washing machine or pantry [both sound a bit dubious to me], wouldn't be affected by this jammer.)

Most of the information cited falls into three categories: things that are probably available to the digital hacker now, that I don't care about; my bank accounts, which I care about because I worry about people stealing from me, not because I worry about people finding out the size of my overdraft, and which are available now to the diligent hacker, as I found out when someone swiped my mother's credit card number last year; and things that will be available in the future, which I don't care about. There are also things that have nothing to do with RFIDs -- how are you going to track every copy of Cosmo I picked up at a friend's house? -- and are probably impossible, but rather outside the scope.

But I can see why people would care about some of these things. They're just not things that I think RFIDs are going to cause - my tax returns won't have 'em, and I wouldn't be carrying them around if they did.

"you have no privacy, you never did, but get over yourself. no one cares about you, so it doesn't matter"

"as for the nyms on this blog... google's forever, certain people's jobs can't have them appear to be advocating a position that may be construed as that of the firm they work for, certain public service jobs don't want you to have opinions in public, and under nyms we can say what we really think or what we want to be heard (i.e. bomb throwing) without having to walk around for the rest of our lives with any specific argument or view available in google."

Am I the only person who finds these two successive paragraphs entirely contradictory? How can any of the latter matter when "it doesn't matter"?

Fascinating. "My argument is that privacy doesn't matter, except that here are all the reasons, that matter, that I (and others) need (our) privacy."

Impressive logic. Very convincing.

> The Pringles example isn't really in the same
> arena, since in the other cases you're talking
> about a permanent item, whereas potato chips are
> not.

Yeah, right: tell that to my waistline!

You guys haven't seen all the implications yet. Neither have I, or anyone.

So, a thief can scan your house, and see that you have something worth stealing? Well, I can scan my house, and when the something is moved, my computer calls the cops, and says "Robbery in progress." My security system sprays him/her with a marker chemical. The doors and windows lock.

These things will have unpredictable consequences.

Jane --

I can see why people would care about some of these things. They're just not things that I think RFIDs are going to cause - my tax returns won't have 'em, and I wouldn't be carrying them around if they did.

I don't think that most of us worry that RFIDs themselves are going to cause certain losses of privacy. However, none of us know all the implications of so much information being available, coupled with the processing power to mine it.

RFIDs are just a tool to gather information. I have seen suggested uses for them, including suggestive advertising (you have peanut butter in your cart; when walking down the next aisle the jelly jars remind you that you might need that, as well) that I dislike, and that probably won't work. But that isn't the problem. The problem is only that they are a symptom of increased surveillance, increased information gathering, by people unaccountable in any real way.

I've mentioned in previous posts a couple of things that could conceivably happen, and I don't think they are all that unlikely. The insurance company could easily arrange to have a "health index" computed based on your consumption patterns (buys fatty foods, buys alcohol, clothes sizes have increased). We have already seen recent instances of lawsuits based on faulty information, flung at large groups of people (DirecTV is suing tens of thousands of people because of where they bought a particular device that could be used to build a descrambler; the device also has plenty of perfectly benign uses, but it will cost you $3500 to plead guilty, and thirty times that much to defend yourself in court. The RIAA has sent cease and desist letters to people who have done no infringement, just because of their last names); will this be made more or less likely when tertiary information can be combined with secondary to identify "likely" candidates for a suit?

Note that there are probably arguments both ways about both of those possibilities. If I have a healthy lifestyle, maybe I should be rewarded with lower insurance rates. Maybe more secondary information would reduce the number of baseless lawsuits. But do you want to live a life in which everything you do outside your home is weighed and evaluated for its possible effects on your health and its indications about your spending habits, all so that other people can more effectively make money off of you?

So, no, I really don't care about RFIDS themselves. So long as they are only used inside the store, they really don't give the store much additional information. They're just another symptom. I care about the unadvertised accumulation of information by people whose primary function is to extract money from me and everybody else.

The possible governmental uses of the information pool are another area altogether, and not really directly relevant to RFID issue.

Chichka

RIAA's & RFID's & MPAA's Oh My!

AMerikkkan Culture is soo stupid that we spend time arguing merits of shaving tools. There is no big picture - it is sort of an amorphous anarchy that swings to and fro...

Aleister Crowley would have been psyched to live these days - a true voyuer's playden...

Big Brother is a Knucklehead

by F. George Moresby

I just now, for the first time ever, got a copy and a “read” of that throbbing manhood of a document called my Credit Report. The Credit Report is to an adult what the Report Card is to a kid and what Transcripts are to those fiberglass decoys of adults called college kids. This is the Tower of Power in Paper. If I were half-way sensitive (or had any nerve endings left after eleven years in the East) I would have been as anxious – in the real, Strunk and White, sense of the word – as a drunken Spanish-major in May to get it too. But, serious and puissant as this piece o’ paper is, I wasn’t. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t. And – you might as well get used to it – I was right.

The “Privacy” crowd deplores things like the Credit Report. They think this sort of thing is immoral and dangerous. They like privacy a lot. I like privacy too, but I’m a little clearer on things. I like privacy when I’m on the toilet, when I pick my snout, when I take a nap in the middle of the day … whenever I do something I know I shouldn’t do. So, being a normal guy, I figure people who make too much noise about privacy are up to no good for the most part. That, or they’re just big ol’ trouble-makers, like that guy who made the stink about the Pledge of Allegiance and those guys about ten years ago who wanted to burn the flag. I even had a wife once who had a bigger-than-credible appetite for privacy – it turned out, she needed privacy to make her phone calls to her boyfriend, to make private arrangements to meet him for their privacy romps. (But I had an appetite for snoopery, so I got her phone records.) OK, yeah, I like privacy too, just like you do. I use the crapper too, just like you do. On the web, I sail Hard Aporn and occasionally drop anchor, just like you do.

And here is my Credit Report – I’m looking at it now – my Declaration of Dependence on the world of Shopkeepers, Landlords, and Loan sharks; the insidious Invasion of Privacy that the trouble-makers despise so loudly. And it’s mostly wrong. Not completely wrong, but mostly. It has my name right, it has my social security number right, it has one of my credit cards right, but that’s about it. And for a middle-aged fellow like myself, that’s not much, considering how much financial cargo I ship. It has my birthday wrong, it has my profession and place o’ work wrong, it has a rhythmic, centrally indented string of addresses that read like blank verse – but not one of them ever harbored or chandled this vessel – I’ll stop with the seagoing metaphor, what I mean is they got all my past addresses wrong. The whole damnable thing is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Credit Report is the Private Sector’s best effort to get the dope on you. Not the government’s, the private sector’s. These are the people who desperately and competitively want to sell you stuff and then want to collect on their loans. These are the people who let you drive their cars, live in their apartments, and use their money. They’re just like your parents when you were a teenager, and they know about as much about you as your parents did. And you’re scared? You’re afraid they Know Too Much? How long were you smoking before your folks figured it out? Hahahahaha. What they think they know, they got wrong. And what they do know is less than I know about you if you’ve got a bumper sticker. They know shit.

This is the famously efficient American Private Sector’s best shot. So just imagine what the government “knows” about you. Nothing. And I suspect it will happily remain ignorant unless you start making a bunch of noise. I wouldn’t have even invoked my Right of Snoopery if that wife hadn’t made such a stink about her Privacy. And I know a lot more about my noisy neighbors than I do about my quiet neighbors.

And hey, you “privacy” squawkers, how many personal and highly-informative bumper stickers are you wearing?

www.themoresbyreport.com

People should know that PSYCHICS are being abused by Big Brother tactics in America. Though many of them are severely disabled, poor, and unable to function or even have a normal social life without assistence, their families and friends are encouraged to completely cut them off so they can be isolated and blockaded in their residence by neighbors controlling their telephone and surveiling the premises with security cameras. Once on their phone line, the spies can not only pick up the line and pose as various parties, but hack into their computer and masquerade as the owner of that and all internet communications, making sure the victim can't ever speak to a real person, be identified, or obtain the proper help. To add insult to injury, the spies send a false FBI file to all the victim's contacts insinuating they're a criminal or some other unsavory character that can't be trusted. They are thus subject to severe, broadband harassment on the order of that the IRS uses on rich, tax-evading business owners. It's a brutal, religiously-ideated (psychiatricly ABNORmal), OBSOLETE experiment to see if God intervenes and can help the victim escape against all odds, and has resulted in the tragic unnecessary DEATH of many innocent people who, prevented from moving and subject to frequent rent hikes, fall into abject POVERTY and end up HOMEless. They just can't beat the system in the computer age. PLEASE DON'T PARTICIPATE in this modern-day drowning of the "witches."

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