[furtim @ Feb 6th 2006 10:59AM]

And even then, they're pretty much useless for the kind of global tracking business people are so frightened of.

No, my fear with RFID is that they'll decrease security. It's so easy right now to read any RFID that somebody's carrying around on them, and once you get that far you're in a position to start spoofing just about anybody you can scan -- which is just about anybody. If we start relying on RFID alone for personal identification, identity theft will become (more?) rampant. And if we use RFID in conjunction with more traditional forms of identification, we lose all the advantages of the technology.

I say leave RFID for applications where it's useful and the lack of security doesn't matter so much, like inventory scanning or those RFID-based checkouts that some stores (not in the US, AFAIK) have. For personal identification and the like, mag strips are a lot more secure (since you have to actually swipe the card to read the data on it, rather than pinging it from across the room) and really not any less convenient. Also, the need to remove a mag strip card to swipe it makes human backup checks more practical. (Looking to see if the picture on the card jives with the person walking through, etc.)

RFID is a great and useful technology, but as usual people are throwing it about willy-nilly like it's some universal panacea, when it's got its flaws just like anything else. I wouldn't worry overmuch about inhaling RFID tracking devices, though. (Mainly because RFID is just about useless for tracking.)