Wednesday, July 28, 2010

BIG WAL-MART IS WATCHING YOU!



If this does not bother you, then all is lost. Have we become so accustomed to be watched that it is now okay to give all of our rights to privacy away? Have we so opened our lives in this social media world that we do not care if some can watch our every move and scan our homes to see what we have purchased?  BIG BROTHER is not the government, it is the Multi-National Corporation. This is the stuff of sci-fi coming true. This is the stuff that so many have warned about coming true. What is to prevent the scanners from recording information on your bank cards? What is to prevent your trash from being scanned? 

Congress needs to pass a law to stop this. Someone needs to invent a personal jamming device to prevent these scans. Or, someone needs to sell lots of magnets!!!

I truly hope the implications of this action doesn't not go unnoticed and that people will care enough to fight this type of intrusion into their lives. Really think about the implications.

"The retail giant Wal-Mart will place radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on underwear, jeans and other consumer items, according to several news reports, including one today from the Wall Street Journal. Companies have long used such "smart tags" to keep track of the inventory of goods going through the supply chain, but the move by Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, to put them on individual consumer items marks a (not unexpected) shift toward something that privacy advocates have long feared.

That's because RFID tags, which can be read at a distance and hence surreptiously, can provide a lot of personal information even if it does not carry it per se. Katherine Albrecht, a privacy and RFID expert who has been following the issue for years, described in a special privacy issue of Scientific American just how the tags pose new security risks to those who carry them, often unwittingly. Here's an excerpt:  
If the idea that corporations might want to use RFID tags to spy on individuals sounds far-fetched, it is worth considering an IBM patent filed in 2001 and granted in 2006. The patent describes exactly how the cards can be used for tracking and profiling even if access to official databases is unavailable or strictly limited. Entitled “Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environ ments,” it chillingly details RFID’s potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called “person tracking units” would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go—in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] museums”—to closely monitor people’s movements.
According to the patent, here is how it would work in a retail environment: an “RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking loca tion]... scans the RFID tags on [a] person.... As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections.... The person tracking unit may keep records of dif­ferent locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times.”
The fact that no personal data are stored in the RFID tag does not present a problem, IBM explains, because “the personal information will be obtained when the person uses his or her credit card, bank card, shopper card or the like.” The link between the unique RFID num ber of the tag and a person’s identity needs to be made only once for the card to serve as a proxy for the person thereafter.…"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=should-you-worry-about-the-tags-on-2010-07-23&sc=CAT_SP_20100726

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