Soctech seminar, Fall 2006
Fall 2006: RFID Technology: SLN 11977 CSE 590 M, Monday 12:30-1:20, CSE 303
(Non-CSE students should register for the graded CSE 590 X - SLN 11981, everything else is identical)
In the past few years there has been more and more talk, both positive and negative, about the transformative potential of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology as it gets more and more viable. The goal of this seminar is to explore the broader legal and sociopolitical implications of RFID, entering into a discussion on privacy, security, and surveillance that has a solid technical and legal basis.
We will begin the seminar with a technical overview of the capabilities of RFID and the regulatory landscape on which laws will be crafted. We will then explore a number of existing RFID deployments and discuss their impact in regards to privacy, security, law, etc. For each deployment, we will have a guest speaker to help frame the discussion. We'll also be crafting a group position paper so that we have something tangible to give back to the community.
Contents
Seminar Organization
Contact information: This course is being organized by Yaw Anokwa (yanokwa at cs), Jim Sfekas, and Travis Kriplean (travis at cs).
The seminar will be discussion-driven, each period led by a small group of seminar participants and/or including invited guest experts. This quarter we will have a seminar room so that we'll all be able to sit at a table. Moreover, we're trying to make it so that we'll have a guest on most of the days. We will spend the days that we don't have a guest preparing questions and gaining context for when guests do join us. Seminar participants will thus be expected to generate questions, but there won't be pressure to organize a class period. We are going to experiment with two additional aspects to the seminar: collaboratively authoring a group position paper and the organization of an open panel discussion with RFID experts.
Seminar Position Paper
We would like to create a whitepaper that summarizes our questions, concerns and thoughts about the RFID issues we've covered. It will give us something coherent and tangible to take away from the seminar and give to others. The document will be collaboratively authored over the course of the quarter. All seminar participants will be required to contribute. That said, we intend this to be relatively low-investment spread over the course of the quarter.
Follow this link to read and edit the paper: UW Society and Technology Group RFID Position Paper.
Open Panel with RFID experts
Near the end of the quarter, we will collectively organize a panel discussion that will be open to the public. We will be inviting leading technical and legal RFID experts to participate. Based on our experiences throughout the seminar, we will be in a good position to ask technically and legally informed questions of the experts, hear them respond to one another, and share our work with the public.
Course Topics
Note: subject to change as we find guest speakers
02 Oct RFID History, Basic Technical Description, and Overview of Applications
- Discussion led by Yaw and Travis
- Main Wiki-contributors: Yaw and Travis
09 Oct What is RFID Actually Capable of? Technical Limitations and Security
- Main Wiki-contributors:
16 Oct RFID and Databases: Capabilities and Possibilities
- Main Wiki-contributors:
23 Oct Open Topic
- Main Wiki-contributors:
30 Oct Regulating RFID: Relevant Privacy Law and Current Regulations on RFID
- Main Wiki-contributors:
06 Nov General Applications: Deployed and On the Horizon
- Main Wiki-contributors: Alan Liu and Craig Prince
13 Nov Application 1: Healthcare
- Main Wiki-contributors:
20 Nov Application 2: RFID in the home
- Main Wiki-contributors:
27 Nov Application 3: RFID Ecosystem
- Main Wiki-contributors:
04 Dec Roundtable on RFID research and experiences with privacy
- Main Wiki-contributors:
Speakers
Steven Shafer, Microsoft Research
- A policy for RFID Privacy, addressing personal information in RFID systems.
Evan Welbourne, UW CSE
- RFID Ecosystem (includes privacy, security, databases, and applications)
Matthai Philipose, Intel Research
- RFID Based activity-recognition system for the elderly
Rene Martinez, Intermec
- Basics of RFID technology or existing RFID deployments.
Administrative info
Course grading and credit-load policies: Subject to change, but variable credits are available to meet differing levels of participation:
- Sign up for 1 credit if you plan to attend, do the readings, participate in discussions, and contribute to the wiki.
- Sign up for 2 credits if you wish to lead/organize a discussion OR contribute extensively to the wiki OR help organize the panel.
- Sign up for 3 credits if you wish to lead/organize a discussion, contribute extensively to the wiki, and help organize the panel (Note: please contact the course organizers in advance if you plan to take this course for 3 credits.)
RFID resources
Research
Applications
- Government
- Passports (trial programs in a few countries, e.g. US)
- Encryption on the passports Wired article
- Commercial
- supply-side tracking of inventory (e.g. walmart)
- gathering more detailed information about consumers (increasing information asymmetry between sellers/buyers)
- enabling buyers to gather more information about products (decreasing above information asymmetry)
Security concerns
- hacking Dutch RFID passports
- RFID viruses (many say the claims are exaggerated)
Privacy & Surveillance concerns
- article expressing concern about being tracked everywhere...
- Anti-RFID site
- Privacy and RFID
Laws directly or indirectly regulating RFID
- Wisconsin law bans forcible implanting of RFID tag
- (old) proposed legislation in California that would attempt to protect consumer privacy
Companies and organizations involved in rolling out RFID technologies