Legislation chipping away at RFID

According to this LA Times article - Senate blocks mandatory ID implants in employees - the Senate of the state of California has passed legislation to prevent employers mandating that employees must have an RFID chip implanted in their bodies. The legislation was prompted by at least one company beginning to market human-ready RFID devices. I am not surprised that later in the article mention is made of at least one company requiring all employees working in a high security area to be implanted in much the same way that dogs and cats are currently chipped for ID purposes.

I find it refreshing that governments around the world are starting to recognise that indiscriminate chipping is a problem yet at the same time I find it disturbing that there needs to be legislation around this at all. This is not a privacy issue for me. Framing it as a privacy issue implies that in some way the concerns could be addressed and corporations could return to punching chips in everyone sufficiently distracted to not see the big needle coming. Instead, I see this issue as one of personal liberty.

RFID is largely used for tracking inventory and livestock with delusions of freedom (as an aside, why don't more cows escape from the paddock? I have yet to see a cattle fence that could sustain a concentrated freedom-inspired stampede. Sure, there might be casualties in the first wave, but think of the common good for all cow-kind? On the other hand, if I was put out to stud where all I had to do was eat and chase the ladies around the farm, I probably wouldn't be too keen on motivating everyone for mass break-out either). As noted in this Slashdot comment, tagging people with RFID marks them as live inventory, which returns me to cattle corralled in the paddock.

I'm sure some companies feel they have a very good reason for wanting to insert foreign bodies under the skin of their workers but my concern is: where do you draw the line? Today, it's for "security purposes" at a job that you may or may not choose to keep. Then more employers require a chip, then most employers require one. How much further does it spread? Ex-prisoners? Welfare recipients? Long stay foreign workers and international students? People who listen to ABBA? The list goes on and on.

Feature creep and requirements bloat are bad enough when it comes to software and project management. I don't see the need to expose personal liberty to the same slippery slope.

Via Slashdot

Inject your RFID tags now! originally uploaded to Flickr by Nadya Peek. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution 2.0 license.