Imagine waving a radio frequency reader around in a crowd and picking up everyone’s most intimate information: name, Social Security Number, address, school, medical insurance and history, credit information, entertainment and shopping preferences, maybe even their biometric identifiers.
A recent story in Network World reports that people are happily taking chip implants with their information encoded so that important medical conditions can be made known to emergency room doctors, or so they can get their special drinks made as they walk into their favorite pub.
No doubt, radio frequency identifiers (RFIDs) have many beneficial uses. But how, I wonder, will that information be protected from identity thieves and other cyber thugs?
How could you encrypt and decrypt that information? How do you grant and remove fine-grained access rights at all the places of business and government agencies accessing that information so they get just the information they need to see and nothing more?
We?ve not solved any of these problems to a reasonable degree over wired and wireless networks and cell phones yet. And even the experts say there?s no way to protect RFID chip information from anyone in proximity who has their own RFID reader. And yet the government approved RFID implants in humans back in October without raising these questions to manufacturers.
So here we go again, putting the cart before the horse, to hell with the consequences, we?ll deal with the mess later. For the first time, I can truly envision a day when every piece of our identifying information can be forged, stolen or otherwise rendered worthless. Welcome to anarchy.
