Loss of Privacy

Several months ago, I wrote about Qantas airlines’ new RFID-enabled Q Tags that tracks passengers’ luggage. It’s now launched its first retail store to customers.

The store, in the Sydney Qantas Club (Terminal 3), will remain in Sydney in July and August, move to Melbourne for September and October and then to Brisbane in November and December.

Qantas Club members and their guests can take advantage of a special deal with a “buy one get one free” offer until December. The tags normally retail at $49.95 each.

The Q Bag Tag has been designed to streamline the bag drop functionality of Qantas’ new faster, smarter check-in system. It replaces the need for paper tags and improves the speed and ease by which a customer moves through the airport. The tag contains world first RFID technology, allowing the tag to be electronically imprinted with the information of the passenger and their flight details.

You can also purchase them online, but they only work on Qantas’ domestic network for now. If things go as smoothly as Qantas hopes, it will roll out to the entire Qantas network. When that happens, look for other airlines to introduce similar measures.

The very thought of my food being tracked after I have eaten it disturbs me. I have no problem with the food being tracked from picking to purchasing as it’s a good way to keep track of inventory and theft, but it should end the moment the consumer purchases the item.

NutriSmart from HannesRemote on Vimeo.

Hannes Harms – “embedding data in food” 2011
Royal College of Art,
Innovation Design Engineering

Tracking certain items for medical reasons is also a plausible use because it helps to keep track of exactly what is happening to a patient and can better help a medical professional to care for the patient. What will happen when a tag malfunctions and says that there are no allergens in a food and you eat it? Can your family sue because you relied on a tag to determine whether or not you should eat it?

Food, on the other hand, is not a practical use of RFID. There is no reason why the food couldn’t come with a small tag that tells you this information instead of a tag that is placed into your food that you must then consume.

Developed by Hannes Harms, a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, these little markers would allow consumers to trace the entire supply chain behind every item in their cupboard, while feeding valuable nutritional information to dieters or people with particularly dangerous food allergies. Kodak, as you may recall, came up with a similar idea a few years ago, though Harms’ prototype extends beyond the realm of medical monitoring. Properly equipped refrigerators, for example, would be able to alert users whenever their stock’s about to expire, simply by scanning the tags. The NutriSmart concept also calls for a smart plate, which Harms describes as an “invisible diet management system.” Just put your meal on the plate and an embedded reader will analyze your grub, tell you how many miles it traveled before arriving at your kitchen and transmit all of its history and caloric data to your phone, via Bluetooth. No word yet on what would happen to these tags post-digestion, though our inner 13-year-olds are giggling at the possibilities.

If the food can keep track of what you’re eating and how much, it won’t take long for insurance companies to want the information. Next will be the advertising companies and the spammers, who will all want a little bit of your money. No government or company should be in the business of tracking what you eat.

Qantas Airlines has introduced a new kind of luggage tag called the Q Bag Tag. The airline is calling it the next generation luggage tag.

There’s little bits and pieces of technology—like an RFID chip—in the new permanent bag tags, and once you’re at the airport you can use one of the updated airport kiosks to check-in. Your luggage information will automatically be linked up with your boarding documents, and you’ll be on your way to security.

Right now the bag tags can only be utilized around Australia, in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and Perth as well as plenty of smaller airports and cities. Of course they’re planning to take over the world with these new little bag tags, so stay tuned.

Frequent flyers get these neat little slices of travel tech along with their fancy flyer credentials, but for the rest of us there’s still hope. Qantas is selling these directly for right around $50, but be sure to affix it securely to your bag. Unfortunately, Qantas isn’t giving out any freebies for lost or damaged tags.

At the moment, the only real drawback appears to be, if something goes wrong between the tag and check-in transfer of information, no one will know where your bag is supposed to go. Otherwise, a passenger’s luggage is tracked nearly constantly. Combined with Qantas’ RFID enabled membership cards and check-in should only take a few minutes, streamlining the entire process.

There are several new phones coming out next year that will have RFID stickers on them, enabling you to pay for your purchases with just a swipe of your cell phone. It all sounds convenient until you learn that retailers want access to your cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes.

Read my entire post over at The Daily Censored.