UW Society and Technology Group RFID Position Paper

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The debate surrounding RFID is one that hits close to home for UW students. The CSE building is currently going through a large scale RFID deployment, foreshadowing what is to come in shops, offices, homes, and cities. In this whitepaper, we explore the broader practical, legal and sociopolitical implications of the technology.

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RFID overview

Technical questions and answers

  • Tag technology
  • What kinds of data is it feasible to store on tags?
  • Is it possible for tags to transmit information only to authenticated readers? How cost prohibitive would that be?
  • Reader technology
  • What kinds of material can readers read tags through? Are there materials that readers cannot (and will not) be able to eventually read through?
  • What are the prospects of readers being able to filter noise created by co-located tags?
  • Database technology
  • What constraints does storage impose on the collection and archiving of such fine-grained data?
  • Can data be scrubbed in order to filter out personal information in such a way that privacy is preserved?
  • Activity recognition
  • What kinds of activities can be inferred by tagged items? How good are existing techniques?

Legal questions and answers

  • Do existing fair information practice laws help to inform RFID privacy issues?
  • Is RFID qualitatively different from other technologies that aggregate massive amounts of data?
  • Are tradeoffs between privacy and convenience necessary?
  • In what cases?
  • Are there policies that can be adopted that minimize the magnitude of the tradeoffs?

Sociopolitical questions and answers

  • In what ways can RFID serve to centralize control over individuals?
  • Which elements of society will be in control of RFID deployments? Who will have access to the databases of information?
  • Is it likely that the availability of such fine-grained information will transform underlying power relations?
  • How could labor relations change if RFID is deployed extensively in the workplace? What types of workers will be most likely to be affected and in what ways? How would such systems influence labor relations between unions and employers?
  • In what ways have powerful institutions shaped the deployment of RFID systems?

Economic questions and answers

  • Are we going to be seeing a mass production of tags that will drop their prices even more?
  • Will active tag technology ever reach mass production, or will it always be too cost prohibitive in comparison to passive tags?