“The fact is, there are no longer any technical barriers to the creation of the surveillance society,” Steinhardt said. If the technology is allowed to develop and IBM’s patent is approved, this may certainly be true.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), agrees. The EFF “would admit that ... because there aren’t many RFID readers in the social environment, it’s not right now a major threat,” he says. “But the problem is, we see the technology moving very quickly ... therefore, the possibility of tracking personal info is going to increase.”

Still, Peter Harrop says that RFID will not become Big Brother. He maintains that RFID won’t diminish privacy any more than other technologies have. You have to consider how little privacy there already is, he says. “If you’ve taken out a [shopper’s loyalty] card, stores like Wal-Mart already know a frighteningly lot about you.”

In fact, it’s remarkable how much consumer information Wal-Mart already has. According to a November 14, 2004, New York Times article, Wal-Mart — which collects information at its cash registers — has 460 tetrabytes of data digitally stored at its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters. “To put that into perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data,” the article says.

The advent of the Internet, cell phones, and various other technologies has shown us just how easy it now is to collect and store consumer information. And there are a number of companies that currently specialize in consolidating such data.

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“We have a massive personal-information superhighway in this country,” says the EFF’s Tien. “There’s this giant infrastructure that collects, buys, and sells your info. Even if there weren’t a single RFID, they’d be doing that.”

Still, Tien says that a consumer’s current lack of privacy should not be a justification for its continued erosion. “It’s a mistake in attitude or approach to say, ‘Well, because we’ve already given up stuff, we should give up more,’ ” he says.

While consumer privacy is already limited, Tien says, it’s diminishing in a relatively controlled environment. Privacy invasion today “is taking place in a setting where you are aware of it, and you know who you’re exchanging info with, and to some extent you’re making a choice about doing so, versus having no choice and not having any knowledge,” he says.

Cell phones may be tracking us, for instance, but the Federal Trade Commission prohibits cell-phone companies from releasing, sharing, or selling one’s personal information or whereabouts, Tien says. In other words, the cell-phone industry “is not the Wild West,” he says, “whereas with location trackers like RFID, there are as of yet no base-line privacy rules.”

In the meantime, the RFID industry is carrying out its plans to tag and track the world. And the public is still largely unaware.

“Plenty of challenges remain, but it’s only a matter of time before the tag line for RFID [...] evolves from technology of the future to business as usual,” IBM recently wrote on its Web site. Once the public realizes what’s at stake, RFID might already be upon us.

“Business as usual” could mean it’s already too late.

On the Web
Katherine Albrecht: //www.spychips.com/
EPC Global RFID explanation: //epcglobalinc.com/
Energy Commerce Congressional Testimony: //energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/07142004hearing1337/hearing.htm
VeriChip: //www.verichipcorp.com/
EFF's RFID page: //www.eff.org/privacy/surveillance/RFID