Crippling RFID to improve privacy?
How do you prevent RFID-tagged contents in your shopping bag from being spied on? That’s the question more consumers will likely be asking as RFID tagging become more pervasive.
It is not hard to imagine that you could be tracked through RFID tags that are embedded in the pair of jeans that you’ve just bought. Spychips.com recently reported that US apparel maker Levi Strauss has been trialing RFID tagging with its jeans at an unnamed retail outlet in US, albeit in the form of “hang tags” that can be clipped off by the jeans owners.
Apart from tear-away RFID tags, retailers can also address RFID privacy concerns through the use of a kill command that’s built into Gen2 RFID tags, which will deactivate the tag permanently. But whether removing or disabling the RFID tag, such an approach will probably be shunned by some retailers in the interest of logistical convenience.
