Saturday, November 1, 2008

RADIO-FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TAGS (RFID)


RFID are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents. Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.

The first radio tags identified military aircrafts as friend or foe during World War II, but it was not until the late 1980s that similar tags became the basis of electronic toll-collection systems. And in 1999, corporations began considering the tags’ potential for tracking millions of individual objects. In that year, Procter and Gamble and Gillette formed a consortium with Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers, called the Auto-ID Center, to develop RFID tags that would be small, efficient and cheap enough to eventually replace the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode on everyday consumer product.

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