In a 6 to 1 vote in the California Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, April 26th, a bill to prohibit the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in state identity documents such as student badges, driver’s licenses, medical cards and state employee cards was passed.
Impetus for the legislation came from the fracas at Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California, where the school decided to require students to wear ID cards with embedded RFID for attendance tracking and in the process stirred up a major parental hornet’s nest. The new bill, supported by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse also outlaws skimming — the unauthorized surreptitious reading of the data stored on an RFID chip.
We’re not convinced that such a bill is necessary but if it is …
… then what about addressing all the other forms of monitoring and tracking of individuals?
Why does RFID get so much press when we’re already subject to our movements being tracked byvideo surveillance and traffic light cameras along with the endless abuse, unauthorized revelation, and outright negligent loss of financial history data by the credit card reporting agencies?
We are tracked, cataloged, indexed, and traced to death (literally) and RFID technology won’t make that any worse.
We suspect that all of the governmental agencies and private companies who already track us so thoroughly are only too happy to see the furore over a new technology distract the public from what they already do so extensively.
