[IP] No possible way THIS will ever be abused ...

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Randall Webmail [rvh40@insightbb.com]
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 9:42 PM
To: David Farber; dewayne@warpspeed.com; johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: No possible way THIS will ever be abused ...

Wearable Tracking Tags Test Privacy Boundaries at the U. of Washington
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i23/23a01501.htm
From the issue dated February 15, 2008

By RANDY DOTINGA

Seattle

It's 2 a.m. Do you know where Evan Welbourne is?

If the University of Washington graduate student is burning the midnight
oil at the computer-science building on the campus here, finding him is as
easy as logging on to a Web page. Whether he is walking down the hallway or
lingering outside a professor's office, an invisible monitoring network
tracks his location and reports back to a database.

Mr. Welbourne doesn't mind. He has agreed to take part in a university
experiment designed to explore the myriad new and serious privacy concerns
raised by tiny tags called radio-frequency identification, or RFID,
tracking devices.

While RFID isn't a household word, the technology behind it has long been a
part of the lives of just about every American.

The devices — chips with radio antennas — emit signals, and tracking them
reveals the movement of people or things. Many stores use the technology to
catch shoplifters at exits.

Now, because the tags can emit individual codes, companies are using them
to track specific inventory items, credit cards, and ID badges.
Conceivably, sensors could follow people throughout their daily lives.

But who should track whom? Where, when, and how? And what effect will this
constant shadowing have on the trackers and the trackees?

To get answers, the University of Washington developed the RFID Ecosystem.
It is an attempt to "create a future world where RFID's are everywhere,"
says Gaetano Borriello, a professor of computer science. At the moment, 140
antennas that pick up signals and 35 RFID readers that interpret data are
monitoring five of the six floors in the university's Paul G. Allen Center
for Computer Science and Engineering.

Many of the devices have been placed in conduits above hallways, making
them virtually unnoticeable to anyone who isn't looking for them. An
additional 16 readers and 32 antennas, which will cover the building's
entrances, are on the way.

The project will grow to allow 100 to 150 computer-science students and
faculty and staff members to track people — and allow people to track them
— on the project's Web site. Mr. Welbourne, who plans to write a thesis
about the project, eagerly signed up to have his privacy invaded.

The plan is to study the choices that participants make: How often will
they track their own activities or those of others? If some selective
blocking is allowed, will they allow certain people to see their comings
and goings but not others? What information will they want to know?

Some information revealed by the RFID project can be trivial. "I
occasionally check how often I've had coffee or when and with whom a
particular meeting occurred, but usually only out of curiosity," Mr.
Welbourne says.

But the project's managers are developing software that may add value to
tracking. For example, Mr. Welbourne says, a program might be able to
answer a question like this: "What Web sites did I visit and what files did
I edit during the last database-group meeting when both Dan and Magda were
in attendance?"

There are some privacy protections built into the experiment. Restrooms,
elevators, and a giant atrium — all part of one large space — are off
limits to monitoring in order to let people do some things, like answer
calls of nature, privately.

Some aspects of protection are actually part of the experiment.
Participants will be able to control who can see information about their
movements and even instantly leave the network. The idea, Mr. Welbourne
says, is to figure out whether people will tend to opt in or opt out: "Do
users feel that the utility of an application justifies the potential loss
of privacy?"

Reality vs. Hype

At least one other university has experimented with tracking technology.
About six years ago, researchers at the University of California at San
Diego created a system that allowed students to track one another's
locations through Wi-Fi-enabled personal digital assistants.

Some students chose not to be tracked, says William G. Griswold, a
computer-science professor at San Diego, while others expanded the level of
access to their whereabouts. "We have many stories about how it created
positive, serendipitous interactions" by allowing people to find one
another on the campus, he says.

Lack of money killed off the project, but the same researchers are
exploring other ways in which people react to machines that spot individual
movements. One way is to change the messages on large public displays
depending on who's walking by, and see what people do. Cellphones carried
by students will alert the displays to their presence.

In Seattle the RFID project's early findings are that "technology itself is
not an inherent risk to privacy, or at least not in any way that can't
eventually be fixed," Mr. Welbourne says. For example, he says, an RFID tag
could be designed to provide location information only to detection devices
that use a specific password, making it impossible for strangers to
surreptitiously track it.

But as with any technology, there are glitches and blind spots. The RFID
antennas can "see" through some barriers, like a textbook, but not through
others, like a human body.

Other potential problems include conflicting signals from multiple tags or
the lack of communication between RFID sensors.

"A lot of this is about trying to separate reality from hype, and find what
will actually work and what won't," says Jennifer King, a researcher who
studies technology and privacy at the University of California at Berkeley
School of Law. "RFID isn't as simple as everybody thinks it is."

In fact, it can make human relationships even more complex. "We discovered
that even when someone grants another person the right to track them, they
may be disappointed if that other person doesn't ask the system about their
whereabouts," Mr. Welbourne says. They end up "feeling shunned in some
way."

In other words, even if the computer knows where you are, there's no
guarantee that anyone will care.

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