the real problem is that you might think that your implant is only to open say a lock butunknown to you it has been programmed to to do all sortsof ther things such as manipulate your finance - does this make any sense Katina?

#Keith: It certainly does make sense. In 2006 M.G. Michael presented "Location-Based Services and the Privacy-Security Dichotomy" at the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Networking, London, 11-13 October 2006, 91-98 held at the headquarters of the British Computer Society http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/15/. At that conference were two keynotes, one from CISCO and the other from Microsoft Research. The CISCO speaker was talking about RFID continuous flows of information and the Microsoft speaker about something called "social living" enhanced by technology at the Cambridge Labs (aka computer-mediated living and socio-digital systems). The discussion came up about how one would really know whether or not their RFID implant/wearable (or other type of sensor) was really only serving a single purpose and not being used for all sorts of things. When M.G. described the potential for the consumer to have a sort of on-off switch to take back control of their own destiny both keynotes agreed that this was a valid measure and probably one of the only ones that would be agreeable to consumers in future scenarios if devices were not just wearable but were implantable.

But not all ICT equipment is obtrusive and so how would you know that you were not being followed covertly as you entered/exited gantries that were for instance hidden from view? Consider that some shoppers' mobile handsets are now under scrutiny around large shopping malls. A similar problem exists there, although service providers enabling this type of anonymous handset tracking do clearly label their equipment (e.g. http://www.pathintelligence.com/en/products/footpath/privacy

"Q: Will I know that your system is in operation when I enter a mall OR STORE?

Yes, it is very straightforward for shoppers to see if our systems are being used because at each of our installations our equipment is clearly visible and labelled with our logo and website address. This website further explains how the system works and the privacy safeguards that we have in place."

This brings me to another discussion that I once had with someone from Symbol Technologies who at the time were testing RFID for baggage handling in a very busy airport in Asia. As they were presenting to me the pros of the RFID kit I was about to purchase for application testing, they did mention that some official testing of some very powerful RFID overhead readers used for bus tracking, were also capturing some ePassport information of travellers in the top floor of the bus who had their ePassports in full view (e.g. in their hands). The testing was carried out in the U.S. prior to implementation of the baggage handling RFID sticky tags. Technically this is possible although ePassports do work only as proximity type tokens and cannot be read from very long distances (e.g. more than 5-10 metres away) because the power required to elicit and excitation of the device is too great for consumer health safety. Whether anecdotal evidence or not, the case remains that this might be possible in the future and serious experiments have taken place that say this is possible. See a serious experiment by Karl Ko...

http://seclab.cs.washington.edu/poster-data/affiliates-2010/Koscher_EPC-RFID-Securty.pdf

Hi Katina,

The technolife Project engaged citizens with questions very connected to the one you are asking.  You may want to take a look at http://technolife.no.  Some of the results seems to point to answers to your question.

Regards