Loss of Privacy

The Huntsville school district aims to keep track of students who ride the bus with a new RFID system.

the system, called ZPass, will allow school administrators to keep better track of those students who ride the bus each day. Kyle Koski, transportation director of the district, said about 5,000 students ride the bus.

“It is an immediate way that we can have feedback if a child does not get off (the bus) where he’s supposed to,” Ward said.

The district and police went on alert twice in August when, on the first and second days of school, two elementary students briefly went missing after taking the wrong buses.

This system is being implemented because two small children got on the wrong bus on the first and second days of school. This sort of thing happens every year when students try to learn the new bus system. A student may have ridden bus #7 last year, but this year bus #12 runs the route that takes him/her home. The same applies to new students who don’t know the bus system, students who have never ridden the bus before and kindergarteners who simply don’t understand how things work.

Each student in the pilot program will be assigned a personalized radio frequency identification (RFID) card, which they will swipe in front of a card reader installed on the bus’ dashboard. Students will swipe their cards each time they get on the bus and whenever they exit.

Using RFID technology and GPS, the card reader records the location of the bus at the time of the swipe and immediately loads that information onto the district’s computer network. At any time, administrators can pull up the data — including a map — and see exactly where a student both entered and exited a bus.

Though the new system is designed to track students, it has a major flaw. The system appears to only match a head count with the count on the RFID reader. There’s nothing to say the person holding little Johnny’s card is really Johnny. This is not a new flaw, yet every district that attempts to use RFID for tracking students seems to ignore it.

Despite the fact that airports are very busy places, we haven’t seen many terrorist attacks on them. The Total Airport Security System, or TASS, claims that we are under threat and need their system to protect us from the terrorists who aren’t attacking us.

Some major flaws in this video is that a lot of things have to happen for a supposed terrorist attack to happen. What happens when the person dispersing the biological agent is actually authorized to be in that area? Nothing will happen until the person actually releases the gas or powder into the system.

Does TASS even begin to understand how many thousands of vehicles are illegally parked every single day at an airport? Trying to figure out which ones are just regular people and which one is there to pick up a terrorist or set off a car bomb is impossible to do.

Facial recognition is not perfect and there are too many false positives currently in the systems for it to be accurately relied upon. Many terrorists or suspected terrorists aren’t going to go to the airport. They are going to pick someone with no record so they won’t be detected. Also, how is an RFID detector going to keep track of the person? Presumably, they have an RFID chip in the passport, boarding pass, or both. What happens when that person puts their passport and boarding pass in an RFID safe wallet or sleeve? It won’t be detected and the police won’t be able to track them so easily.

While the truck in the cargo area could be a legitimate threat, not all trucks have electronic seals and there would be no way to know if the cargo was actually opened. Even then, TASS only sets up monitoring on the truck, based on a presumed GPS device within the truck. If this were some sort of plot or something dangerous, simply monitoring it isn’t going to stop any kind of explosion.

TASS then assumes that because all of these things are happening at the same time, there must be a multi-targeted attack about to happen. The fact that any or all of these things are easily explained away points to overreaction and paranoia instead of some type of attack. Given the fact that no one has attempted to do any of these things individually, yet alone combined, suggests that TASS is not only not necessary, but a huge waste of money.

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.