RFID, Smart cards, Google - privacy and liberty issues

Tuesday 14 July 2009

Katherine Albrecht, co-Author of Spychips, discusses plans to incorporate RFID into every item we own, giving corporations and governments the ability to track everything we buy, when we buy it, when we use it and our locations at all times. In so doing, they can build up a database profile on you - a history which they can (and do) share with governments.

Scared?

What about the privacy issues that Google represents? Google claims to know more about us than our doctors do and if the government lets Google hold our medical records, it will know all of our most intimate details - even more so if we have Google email accounts.

Even if we don't have Google accounts, or don't use Google to search the internet, any sites we visit which have Google ads, can extract our IP addresses and browsing habits from those sites and build up a highly marketable personal history. Insurance companies, doctors - and the government would take a keen interest in it, as would hackers.

Find yourselves another email provider and search engine. The Startpage search engine is customisable, hides your IP address from destination sites and has stringent privacy controls.

Watch Katherine at the 2009 Libertarian Party of Connecticut Convention:















Find out more about RFID services and which products and public areas house RFID chips at RFID Journal.
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2 Responses to “RFID, Smart cards, Google - privacy and liberty issues”
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JuliaM said...

"Scared?"

With our government's legendary low-cost-wins approach to IT outsourcing? Not really. They'll never get it to work.

Don't want to be paying for them to try, mind you...

14 July 2009 at 07:21
Fausty said...

From what Albrecht said, I gather that the corporations are paying for the chips and governments are giving them tax breaks.

I find that scary.

14 July 2009 at 09:16