RFID privacy: Who the real bad guys are

An article in today’s Sacramento Bee sent to me by one of my readers about RFID chips and privacy concerns was most disturbing to me not for what it did say, but for what it didn’t say. The article cited many potential cases of government and corporate spying on our shopping habits and what we keep in our medicine cabinets. But, what this article and all articles on subjects like this fail to realize is that the real violators are always the criminals – the ones who can read the info off the RFID chips with a hand-held reader as they pass by us and use it for finanical and identity theft. MasterCard and Visa have already issued 1.5 million RFID-enabled cards, according to Simpson Garfinkle, a privacy expert and author quoted in the article. The government wants RFID chips on passports. And soon we’ll see a push to put them on our driver’s licenses and medical cards. All precursors, of course, to human implants, and when that happens, the identity and financial information thieves will have a field day.