Well, even further: it's not like you need RFID -- or even computers -- to acquire illicit copies of medical records. Or to track someone's movements. Or to identify someone.
I think the biggest danger is that if there are large caches of RFID data lying around, someone might be tempted to do dubious kinds of datamining that they wouldn't if they had to go to the effort of collecting the data in the first place. But the technology as described in the article doesn't particularly lend itself to that.
The idea of somebody with a scanner walking down a row of people and reading records from their bicep seems like it ought to be nefarious, but I haven't been able to think how. You could just as easily collect the data from a computer system or a filing cabinet. Etc.
A part of me wants to find the idea alarming, but I think it's more that I find the military itself alarming, not its technologies.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 09:19 pm (UTC)I think the biggest danger is that if there are large caches of RFID data lying around, someone might be tempted to do dubious kinds of datamining that they wouldn't if they had to go to the effort of collecting the data in the first place. But the technology as described in the article doesn't particularly lend itself to that.
The idea of somebody with a scanner walking down a row of people and reading records from their bicep seems like it ought to be nefarious, but I haven't been able to think how. You could just as easily collect the data from a computer system or a filing cabinet. Etc.
A part of me wants to find the idea alarming, but I think it's more that I find the military itself alarming, not its technologies.