Fang-Face writes “There is
a brief article at American Libraries Online about how California has a bill working its way through the legislative process that:
would prohibit the inclusion of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in all state-issued identity documents, including library cards. The Identity Information Protection Act of 2005 would also ban the practice of skimming — the surreptitious use of an electronic reading device to collect RFID data from an unsuspecting person carrying an object with an embedded chip.
Looks like an interesting movement to protect privacy.“
banning the chips
According to the article the CA bill bans the actual chips which is way beyond what ALA’s resolution talked about which was personal information only.
For everyone who has thrown fits recently about Gorman and others being anti-technology luddites I assume there will be equal outrage here over something that actually inhibits progress.
Re:banning the chips
The erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights is not progress, it is encroachment. The problem with technology is not technology, it is the misuses to which it is being put. If the U.S. is supposed to be a free and open society, then why this insistence on turning it into a state where Big Brother can gather every piece of personal information about a person from cradle to grave? Read Harry Harrison’s Star World trilogy to see what kind of society is developing in the industrialized states of the world.
Re:banning the chips
RFID chips are not an erosion of civil liberties.
I’ll pay for your tin foil hat though. After all tin foil is a barrier to those pesky rf signals.
Re:banning the chips
Again: They – are – if – you – use – them – that – way.
By themselves they are not, but a tool is an inanimate, passive thing. It can be used for good or for evil and it has no say in the matter. And no one anywhere should ever trust government.
It’s not the RFID itself, it’s the combination
The bill doesn’t ban RFID chips. It bans RFID chips in personal identification cards–including library cards.
There is a real and potentially serious privacy issue when you get the combination of chipped books and chipped patrons (that is, patrons carrying chipped cards). I wrote about that in the “Policy and Library Technology” issue of Library Technology Reports (41:2). Others have written about it as well.
The bill attempts to prevent a preventable problem, the ease with which the person and the object can be associated and tracked. Not paranoia; just good sense.
Re:It’s not the RFID itself, it’s the combination
But the chip doesn’t have to contain anymore than the barcode number. The actual personal information would be in the database, accessible only by library staff.
Re:It’s not the RFID itself, it’s the combination
I know that my library’s online catalog will let me see what I have checked out, based on my provision of my borrower number. which as far as I know *is* the barcode number. I would assume that others do as well. So it’s still way more data linkage than I think is needed or desirable.
Now, if the RFID chips were encrypted so that they were only readable when actually in contact with a device reading the scannable bar code–what’s now being proposed for U.S. passport RFIDs–that would be different.
Re:It’s not the RFID itself, it’s the combination
We have it so that people can access their record at home, but it requires a library barcode and a PIN.