Comments on: Do You Want RFID in Your Mobile Phone? http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/do-you-want-rfid-in-your-mobile-phone/ A premier personal finance blog, established 2003. Within, Flexo discusses his own experiences with money, and he and other authors comment on a wide range of personal finance topics. Thu, 31 May 2012 23:50:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: anonymous http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/do-you-want-rfid-in-your-mobile-phone/comment-page-1/#comment-195463 anonymous Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:00:09 +0000 http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/?p=6958#comment-195463 DO NOT WANT DO NOT WANT

]]> By: Dan Holt: Laid Off http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/do-you-want-rfid-in-your-mobile-phone/comment-page-1/#comment-195385 Dan Holt: Laid Off Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:14:41 +0000 http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/?p=6958#comment-195385 There is some concern here, but not the fear that is spread pretty thick on the video. But then, fear sells; and they are selling a book, even if it's only 6.00 on amazon. Long-range RFID chips on the market have a range of 450 feet, however, passive tags would have to be used on the shoe rfid, unless the company broke into your house and ripped your shoe apart to change the rfid's battery when needed. Passive rfid chips get their power from the antenna, and have shorter ranges; somewhere on the order of 40 feet. In New York, the average city block is about 264 feet or 20 blocks per mile. The government or tracking company would have to place 6.5 antennas on every street. According to Columbia University, there are 6,374 miles of street in New York City, so ~828,000 antennas would have to be purchased and installed. Most commercial rfid antennas go for $200 up, but let's say the government/company could get a huge discount and pay only $50. That's $41M to cover one city, labor to install would make it ~$60M. Then maintenance and power supply would push the cost to far greater heights than the tracking would be worth to any company. And that's just New York. With a rumored 3.75 million miles of road in America, so ~487.5M antennas would need to be produced and installed. With my assumptions above, to implement this kind of technology across America would cost an extraordinary amount of money: think trillions of dollars when you count in maintenance and power supply. And this is just the antennas. While the id tags themselves only cost about $.07, that's another $21.5M to have one chip per U.S. citizen. Now, they'd probably want 2-5 chips, so that plus the cost to install said chips into products could easily reach a billion dollars+. Then there's the army of people, and who knows how many computer centers to be built and maintained and powered to actually turn the tracking into usable data. You get the drift. There are far easier ways of tracking people. Many cell phones have GPS systems built in to them, so they are already trackable and in some cases, being tracked (usually with a warrant.) On the bright side, if rfid is implemented everywhere, it has a great vulnerability-it uses radio frequencies. So a quarter-sized rf jammer would quickly show up on the market, much like radar detectors/jammers for cars today. If the government goes to far, or won't stop a company from going to far, the market will step up to take care of the right to privacy given to us by the Supreme Court. There is some concern here, but not the fear that is spread pretty thick on the video. But then, fear sells; and they are selling a book, even if it’s only 6.00 on amazon.

Long-range RFID chips on the market have a range of 450 feet, however, passive tags would have to be used on the shoe rfid, unless the company broke into your house and ripped your shoe apart to change the rfid’s battery when needed. Passive rfid chips get their power from the antenna, and have shorter ranges; somewhere on the order of 40 feet. In New York, the average city block is about 264 feet or 20 blocks per mile. The government or tracking company would have to place 6.5 antennas on every street. According to Columbia University, there are 6,374 miles of street in New York City, so ~828,000 antennas would have to be purchased and installed. Most commercial rfid antennas go for $200 up, but let’s say the government/company could get a huge discount and pay only $50. That’s $41M to cover one city, labor to install would make it ~$60M. Then maintenance and power supply would push the cost to far greater heights than the tracking would be worth to any company. And that’s just New York.

With a rumored 3.75 million miles of road in America, so ~487.5M antennas would need to be produced and installed. With my assumptions above, to implement this kind of technology across America would cost an extraordinary amount of money: think trillions of dollars when you count in maintenance and power supply. And this is just the antennas. While the id tags themselves only cost about $.07, that’s another $21.5M to have one chip per U.S. citizen. Now, they’d probably want 2-5 chips, so that plus the cost to install said chips into products could easily reach a billion dollars+. Then there’s the army of people, and who knows how many computer centers to be built and maintained and powered to actually turn the tracking into usable data. You get the drift. There are far easier ways of tracking people.

Many cell phones have GPS systems built in to them, so they are already trackable and in some cases, being tracked (usually with a warrant.)

On the bright side, if rfid is implemented everywhere, it has a great vulnerability-it uses radio frequencies. So a quarter-sized rf jammer would quickly show up on the market, much like radar detectors/jammers for cars today. If the government goes to far, or won’t stop a company from going to far, the market will step up to take care of the right to privacy given to us by the Supreme Court.

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