Section 5.4. Conclusion

5.4. Conclusion

The privacy implications of RFID are being hotly debated today in political, legal, business, and technical forums. Interested parties in the debate include the RFID technology backers, privacy-rights advocates, businesses, politicians, researchers, and consumers. Because RFID is an emerging technology, however, laws enacted now might become obsolete in the future. On the technical front, both tag-level and reader-level schemes have been invented in the form of kill commands and blocker tags, respectively, to deactivate the readability of a tag.

A combination of legal and technical measures might offer a solution to the privacy issues that can be broadly accepted by all the interested parties. Although a clear consensus has yet to emerge, on the political and legal front, support is gathering around a three-point standard of informing customers of the presence of RFID tags in purchased items, obtaining customer permission to use the tag data, and destroying (optionally) the tags before customers leave the store.