LuminousVoid

Most people agree that ubiquitous and promiscuous RFID chips are coming to the market. Some say they’re going to stay out of the consumer market, operating just for supply chains. While others say that it will reach consumers and thus the general population.

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of the discussion of RFID threats to privacy and information safety are premised on a certain hierarchy of the RFID landscape: Ubiquitous chips being watched by fewer readers in the hands of ‘larger’ institutions — retailers, marketers, government entities.

This article on RFID adoption expectations in the UK contains an interesting quote:

“Nokia for example are making significant progress in the area of Near Field Communications and can already produce cheap mobile RFID readers for around $700, but prices will inevitably come down quickly as they move this technology into the mass product market. This will enable you to “touch” a poster of Kylie with your RFID enabled phone to download information and music. People will be able to use their phones in many more ways from checking whether an item is in a shop stockroom to using web services to finding more information about products.”

While 700 bucks is a lot of money, that clearly is going to drop. And these people at least are expecting RFID readers to reach the consumer level. So we can expect that it’s not going to be just institutions that are going to be capturing the data given off by an individual’s RFIDs, but other individuals as well. Thus concerns about RFID privacy aren’t going to be properly addressed simply by regulating or watchdogging business privacy policies and practices.