Another RFID flap

By Deni Connor, NetworkWorld.com, 11/23/05

Quite a brouhaha has started between Mike Karp, storage newsletter columnist for Network World, and Ron Milton, executive vice president of ComputerWorld, over what else -- RFID. (Both publications are owned by the same company, IDG.)

You may wonder what RFID has to do with storage - well, at ComputerWorld’s Storage Networking World in Orlando last month, event organizers decided to put RFID labels in attendees' show badges without their explicit consent.

Milton says that signs announcing the use of RFID were hung about the floor of the hotel sponsoring the show -- I didn’t see any, neither did Karp. Neither apparently did a lot of other attendees, says Karp, who promises to share Milton’s e-mail and his response in one of his next storage newsletters.

My colleague, online editor Melissa Shaw, commented on the flap in her Layer 8 blog.

Another colleague, Senior Editor Denise Dubie attended CA World in Las Vegas recently. She says that attendees and the press were notified of the RFID’s presence in their badges. She removed the chip and threw it away.

What did I do with my RFID label? When Karp told me about it, I tore it in half - thus disabling it - discarded one half, removed the sticky backing from it and used it to hold the battery in my MP3 player.

Next time, I hope the sponsors of Storage Networking World do more to tell attendees about the badges. Nobody likes to have their movements tracked, especially without their explicit consent.

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