Sun, 25 May 2003 16:32:29 GMT

Now that's small.

No that's not dust they're prototype RDIF tags from Hitachi

[Micah's Weblog]

Wow – that is small. About 10 years ago I met with the head of strategic planning at Loblaws, Rob Almeida, who then went on to set up President's Choice Banking. We were talking about the future of supermarkets. At the time, he forecast two things: that supermarkets would scale up to 80,000 square feet. Which they have done. And then, that a maximum size would be reached and the strategy of bigger is better would have to be rethought.  His other big idea was that, at some point, inventory management technology may advance to the point where it would be possible to go the other way. To have a small mart that would have everything you needed because it would be able  to track everything so well that it would only carry what we wanted. I wonder are we in sight of Rob's second prediction?

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

These are going to change a lot of things. If items, or people, can be tracked by specks almost too small to see, what will happen to our expectation of privacy? WHat will happen to our constitutional rights against search and seizure when we can really have no reasonable expectation of privacy? But then, we could use the same technology and follow politicians everywhere. Oh, this is going to be a fine kettle of fish. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

These are small enough to inhale, spread across clothes, etc. with powerful enough transceivers you could very much track a person doing just about anything with the proper application of these. In short, this needs regulated.

my proposition is that any device that can be used to identify and track human beings, being intended for that or not, should be labelled as such with a warning label that is readable to the unaided human eye.

in short, that would prevent rfid dusting. i mean these things can be inhaled or theoretically injected in a wide variety of ways.