RFIDs Used To Secretly Track Officials At Tech Summit

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the whoops dept

Every time people write about the potential for RFID chips to be misused, people come along and say that the possibility of them to be misused is pretty slim, and people should just calm down. While we agree that some of the anti-RFID rants have gone a bit overboard, the threat of the technology being secretly used to track people might not be so overblown. A report coming out late last week discovered that badges used at the World Summit on the Information Society last week included RFIDs for tracking attendees. The attendees were apparently unaware the badges included these chips. The article is a little confusing, and does raise some questions. First, since the people who figured this out snuck into the summit, some of the article focuses on the poor security that let these people get official badges with fake identification – and the article shifts back and forth between the two stories as if they’re related. The article also doesn’t explain how they determined that there was an RFID chip and what it was used for. While the article claims that people at the conference were “tracked” by these chips – it’s unclear that’s what actually happened. They seem to indicate that attendees could have been tracked – but not that they actually were tracked. Still, it does point out some of the problems with putting RFID chips in everything. Perhaps people need to be looking more seriously at technology that might stop the “bad” aspect of RFIDs, such as a blocker chip that lets users only allow specific RFIDs to work when they want or need them to.