Usefulness of RFIDs worth the annoyance

Shall we begin accepting nominations for Most Annoying Wireless Technology?

There are plenty to choose from already. We've got our staticky, unreliable cellphones, and worse yet, the irritating ring tones from our colleagues' phones. There's also WiFi, the short-range broadband system that's free in some places, costly in others, and totally absent when you really need it.

But the wireless technology with the greatest potential to drive us batty still hovers just offstage. No doubt you've heard of it--RFID, or radio frequency identification tags. These are the tiny devices that will soon be used by businesses and the military to wirelessly track cartons of Barbie dolls and crates of ammo.

The tags are little radio transmitters with very short range. They only transmit when brought within a few feet of an RFID reader, and they simply transmit an identification code. Put a reader near a warehouse door, and every pallet of merchandise is automatically inventoried. Put the tags in each individual item, and retailers could track inventory with digital precision and nail shoplifters without half trying.

Consumers could even have their own RFID readers built into cellphones. Point it at a circular saw at the Home Depot. Your phone could not only display the price, but automatically log onto a Consumer Reports-type Internet service and display product reviews and prices at competing retailers. Or you could build RFID readers into refrigerators and kitchen cabinets. They'd automatically take inventory of all the food in the house, and remind you to buy more milk and lima beans.

So what's so annoying about that? Merely the prospect of a world in which everything you buy--every single thing--can shout "here I am" to any passerby armed with the right kind of detection gear. Privacy advocates are understandably horrified, and their protests have already forced companies here and abroad to back away from using RFID tags in consumer products. But the technology won't go away. Like cellphones and WiFi, RFID is at least as useful as it is annoying.

All to the good, then, that people are thinking hard about how to get the benefits of RFID while preserving their privacy. There's talk of requiring stores to permanently deactivate RFID tags once a consumer has bought the product. But that would eliminate some benefits of the technology, like the fridge that keeps track of your food for you. Still, it might be better to sacrifice that advantage on the altar of privacy.

Not that we absolutely have to. The scientists at RSA Security Inc. in Bedford have come up with an appealing alternative--an RFID jammer. This type of tag sends a signal that would cause every reader in range to ignore any other RFID signals, thus protecting the user's privacy.

"You can think of the blocker tag as doing for RFID the same thing a paper bag does for the products you buy today," said Dr. Burt Kaliski, RSA's chief scientist. Indeed, that's one possible way of deploying the tags. They'd be attached to your shopping bags, so that an RFID reader couldn't identify the items inside.

But since RFID tags cost money, it'd be cheaper and simpler to offer the jammer tag as a device that a consumer would keep in a pocket, wallet or purse. It might even be built into a cellphone. Any tagged item in your possession would be hidden from nearby scanners But with the jammer deactivated, your tagged items would again be readable. That would come in handy when you want to return a defective product to the store--no need for a receipt because the RFID code proves you bought it there.

If the thought of an RFID blocker eases your fear of the technology, your name isn't Katherine Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion.

Albrecht, a nationally known anti-RFID activist, praised RSA for trying to reconcile tagging and personal liberty. "Thank goodness that somebody is paying attention to the privacy issue and taking it seriously," she said. But merely jamming the tags isn't good enough for Albrecht. Not only does she worry that many consumers won't take advantage of the jamming technology.

Albrecht also warns that government agencies could one day require citizens to use RFID tags as a form of identification, and forbid efforts to jam them. "I think the main way we're going to prevent RFID abuse is to limit its implementation," she said. "And this RFID blocker tag doesn't limit its implementation; it actually encourages it."

Albrecht's a smart and charming woman, but she might have opposed the invention of the telephone, out of fear that the government would listen in. She'd have been right, too. But we dealt with that problem through laws, not by abandoning the idea of telecommunication.

So let the legal and political debate begin over how best to use RFIDs without being used by them. It'll get tedious and, yes, annoying. But we humans love our gadgets far too much to give them up entirely, even when they talk about us behind our backs.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.