RFID-Wi-Fi Combo to Track People in Times of Emergency

Forgive me if I see the danger here. Big Brother is rearing his head even more now in the U.K., with the latest iteration a gathering called The Wireless Event, a London-based get-together of the best and the brightest in Wi-Fi technologists. Also on hand were a handful of very dedicated people from Siemens, who were pushing a melding of Wi-Fi and RFID tags in order to track people in times of emergency.

Now, the italics were mine, but the emphasis should be yours as well. The very idea that companies like Siemens and Motorola and others who have spoken out in favor of this kind of tracking can come together and talk all nice and neat about using modern technology to track people's every move gives me the creeps. Apparently, they want to also track phones and computer equipment that are enabled for Wi-Fi, with the focus on hospitals. But who's to say that the RFID tags couldn't be used to track patients as well, even after they've been discharged. Where's the privacy then?


This is Britain, after all, the country that most recently gave us the chilling-effect combination of wireless hovering surveillance drones and street patrol officers wielding live webcams. Sounds like we're talking about a whole new level of bureaucracy here, not to mention a whole new level of invasiveness.

Proponents of the combined RFID and Wi-Fi systems say that their aim is to head off safety problems by tracking students as they head home from school or by being able to easily locate equipment in huge hospitals. That might very well happen. My concern is that once that technology is available, it will fall into the hands of those who have far more nefarious designs on people's whereabouts. The silver lining in the RFID inevitability until now has been that the tags can't be tracked at a distance. Adding Wi-Fi to the mix changes that completely, enabling any and all to use satellites in the sky to find out exactly when and where people are at any given time and place. Makes detective work a hell of a lot easier, but it also makes me cringe when I think about concepts like individual privacy.




Written by Tom Charity
Published in Other Tech