www.noplacetohide.net

I found this website highly informative in its discussion of RFID tags. For instance, a radiofrequency identifier tag does not need a power source to work, they need to be scanned by a low-power device and some can carry in excess of 128 bits of information.

According to Chapter 10, "RFID technology is a technology that is rapidly crossing over from being expensive and experimental to universal usefulness."

Some people have even gone so far as to have these things implanted!

The idea that a cup of coffee at Starbucks and a cell phone conversation can become "datapoints on the vast and growing matrix of our lives," in the form of information that Starbucks owns and retains about me is at once fascinating and disturbing.

One day we truly will have "no place to hide" and we will wonder what happened to our privacy and freedoms, but it will be too late.

"Management of RFID in Libraries" Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2005

I find this article immensely interesting. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of RFID tag usage in libraries. Imagining being capable of eventually checking in an entire stack of books at once is astounding to me!

The library where I work have exit gates and we put a card in the pocket in the back of the book to signify an item has been checked out, which also prevents the alarm from sounding. While I suppose this is fairly typical library security, I had not thought of the tag in the pocket as an RFID before reading this article.

I guess it is possible that RFIDs will replace barcode technology, but I think the technology needed to adapt it to a library setting (an RFID that would work in a thin item, and last many years) is not yet in existence.