Lawyers Debate Data Tracking, Privacy Implications
Sensor networks offer great promise and post considerable peril, as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and like tools infiltrate life, panelists said Fri. at the Assn. of American Law Schools (AALS) conference. The National Security Agency (NSA) domestic spying controversy (WID Dec 20 p1) and 2005’s rash of security breaches are highlighting sensor network concerns, they said. U. of Louisville Prof. Lars Smith asked if society is about to enter an era out of Steven Spielberg’s futuristic crime drama Minority Report.
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The NSA scandal offers a cautionary lesson for RFID, said Wayne State U.’s Jonathan Weinberg. Neither phone and e-mail spying nor RFID networks necessarily fit “privacy” as jurists define it, he said. Options for bridging the gap include barring NSA from its practices, junking familiar ideas on privacy and “an entirely different set of privacy rules… and I don’t have any idea what those would look like,” he said.
Creative uses of RFID, and privacy concerns about them, should be weighed as the technology goes mainstream, Weinberg said. The same technology that can analyze traffic patterns and track stolen vehicles could “see which local bartender is sneaking off to which hotel with which high school teacher,” he warned. Calls for policy on RFID have been varied but a proposal for biometric identifiers in passports shows promise -- a swipe of a barcode is needed to access stored data, he said. That function addresses the problem of improper access to citizens’ personal data. Item-level tagging of consumer goods -- from TV sets to automobile transmissions -- involves different issues, Weinberg said, adding that any tag should be labeled clearly and be easily removable.
RFID will mean savings for retailers and consumers but it’s not likely to extend to cereal boxes and soap bars until the cost drops drastically. Cato Institute Dir.-Information Policy Studies Jim Harper said the best and most consistent rules for the technology are in the laws of supply and demand and physics. High-tech tags “cost money, readers cost money and storing data costs a great deal of money,” said Harper, who runs Privacilla.org.
The issue underlying the NSA scandal and RFID’s evolution is that neither relies on collecting data on named individuals or making case-by-case decisions, Weinberg said. In govt. electronic surveillance, investigators collect all they can, with suspects’ names emerging as a mass of data is analyzed. With RFID and other sensor networks, data are collected on all that’s tagged, he said. Experian privacy chief Ben Isaacson offered a multichannel view of tracking and compiling data. Much of the session was theoretical and philosophical, he said, but he wanted to focus on the marketplace. Biometric identifiers like retinal scanners haven’t reached the market yet, but rudimentary tools, like supermarket discount cards and basic e-commerce analysis, do see wide use, he said. And the divides between previously discrete information channels are “closing rapidly because of digitization of all that data.”