I happened to see a series of letters in a magazine the other day, the meaning for which I did not know. The letters were “RFID” and with all the other letters, numbers and symbols one must keep track of these days, somehow, the letters were “flying under the radar”; however, following a quick check of their meaning (thank God we still have open access on the internet through portals and search engines) I suspect that we all should pay closer attention to RFID.
In short, RFID stands for “Radio Frequency Identification” and is currently used by several well known manufacturers to track large portions of their inventories. They are microdot size chips with intelligent data storing capability that can be scanned by specialized readers. They became attractive to retailers because they are so small and inexpensive that they can be unobtrusively added to packaging for inventory management purposes. In reality they can be made about the size of the dot for the letter “i” in the word size or the period at the end of this sentence. Depending upon the functional purpose and the amount of the tracking or metric intelligence required they can be larger; however, so much information can be stored that they have become a key component of the new drive for national ID cards, secure area access cards, employee cards, personal health record cards and even secure counterfeit-proof currency. Beyond the tagging of inanimate products there is already use of the tags for pet identification and serious discussions are beginning on “tagging” of all criminals and, just possibly, all U.S. Citizens. I can hear the pitch now: “You never have to worry about accidentally leaving your passport behind. A biometric ID chip under the skin can be readily scanned as you go through the airport security screener." Oh, Joy! George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Ira Levin must be thinking in the great beyond: “We told you so….”Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J47hny8q_J4