Second Thoughts About Wearing RFID Tags

I felt uncomfortable after I posted yesterday. Sometimes I write stuff, and it doesn’t feel right, and I don’t know why… If I let it sit a while, I usually come to understand the problem, but I was in a rush yesterday to post a followon to my BusinessWeek.com column on privacy concerns about RFID tags, and so didn’t let it sit.

Damaged Justice spotted part of the problem I only sensed: my kneejerk suggestion of putting the onus on government to solve this problem. He provides a philosophical argument for the flaw, which is fine.

I think a related issue has to do with how our society tends to deal with privacy-related problems. The tendency is to allow business to police itself—until some crisis occurs. So we’ve had this buildup in identity theft, and now that millions of people have had their identities misused, the Federal Trade Commission is talking about tightening data security and providing restitution to victims.

Without a crisis, businesses are allowed to do their thing in terms of taking advantage of the leverage technology affords into our privacy. Banks and credit card companies use our spending habits to decide how to market to us, sell our information, or even discontinue serving us if we don’t spend enough, pay our bills too quickly, or whatever.

I suspect what’s going to happen with these RFID chips, whether implanted in our arms or tattooed onto our wrists, is that businesses will provide incentives to people to be scanned. Isn’t that really the businesslike approach? You don’t “require” anything, but rather make participation a seemingly attractive business proposition.

So if you allow Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Safeway, or whomever, to scan for your personal health data as you shop—to decide based on your health history whether to throw aspirin, hemorrhoid medication, or vitamins in front of you—you’ll receive discounts, rebates, special shopping privileges.

So it could all seem not only harmless, but actually beneficial to many people. Hey, I’m saving money just by walking past a scanner. Isn’t that cool.

It’s when people start being denied life insurance or jobs because of a “problem” in their medical history that we’ll begin to hear the outcry. The question is whether the outcry will be loud enough to be perceived as a real problem, or just the whining of malcontents.