Maintaining Privacy in RFID Enabled Environments

Abstract

The presence of RFID technology in every-day life is expected to become a reality in the near future. Yet, as RFID tags enter consumer households and threaten to identify their owners’ belongings, whereabouts and habits concerns arise about the maintenance of privacy. People are afraid of being’ scanned’ or tracked with the help of a technology that is invisible to them and not under their control. To address this consumer concern standardization bodies such as the Auto-ID Center have proposed to integrate a kill functionality into RFID tags. The present article argues that killing tags at the store exit is, however, not a viable long-term strategy to ensure default privacy. Too many business models and services are already in the pipeline to use RFID functionality after a purchase has taken place. Economic interest and consumer benefits risk undermining widespread tag killing. As a response to this dilemma we propose a simple disable/enable mechanism. Our suggestion is to disable all tags by default as part of the shopping check-out process and provide consumers with a password that enables them to re-enable their objects’ tags if needed.