A prominent Washington IT trade group is taking exception to a new
government draft report raising privacy concerns over the use of RFID for
human tracking.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Emerging Applications and Technology
Subcommittee said in a 15-page report that the use of RFID in identification cards or tokens could lead to illegal tracking of Americans.
“Without formidable safeguards, the use of RFID in identification cards and
tokens will tend to enable the tracking of individuals’ movements, profiling
of their activities and subsequent, non-security-related use of
identification and derived information,” the DHS draft report states.
But the American Electronics Association (AeA) isn’t buying it, saying the report contains “sweeping, unsubstantiated and incorrect generalizations.”
The AeA said the issue was bad behavior, not bad technology.
“[The draft report] misstates the fact that ‘tracking of human beings’ is
endemic to RFID,” the AeA said in a statement. “In fact, technology by
itself is neutral — only those who control data may track people.”
RFID technology uses computer chips containing information that can be
transmitted and read from a remote reader. The most widespread use of the
technology is for inventory tracking and biometric passports, the latter of which contains encrypted information.
RFID is also being explored in the public and private sectors for use with various types of identification cards, encrypted and
unencrypted.
According to the DHS draft report, there are “specific, narrowly defined”
uses of RFID in human tracking.
“Miners or firefighters might be appropriately identified using RFID because
speed of identification is at a premium in dangerous situations, and the need
to verify the connection between a card and bearer is low,” the report
states.
“But for other applications related to human beings, RFID appears to offer
little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and
data integrity.”
In comments filed with the DHS last week, the AeA said personal privacy
could be preserved with the use of RFID.
The AeA suggested the DHS “develop polices that protect personal privacy
first, and then empower agency implementers to choose the technologies that
will fulfill those policies.”
The AeA also said the DHS draft report is flawed since other ID
technologies, including contact-based chips and bar codes, could be used for
human tracking.
“It is the intent and practice of the technology user that determines how
the data culled from the technology itself will be used,” the AeA said.
“Because all of these systems are machine-readable, they are all capable of
tracking the credential holder if it is the intent and desire of the
implementing agency to do so by collecting and saving the information of all
those who pass through the system.”
