do you have a chipped bank card or passport?

[seckle]

be careful.
http://www.difrwear.com/insecure.shtml

[narcossist]

"Spychips make Orwell's Big Brother seem relatively harmless."

Quite how being tracked [and presumably not everyone can possibly all be tracked at once, unless they choose to simply target brand demographics as in the levi's example] is as bad as complete totalitarean repression of thought and emotion is a little puzzling, though perhaps excusable when you've books to be selling...

i'm a skeptical tnuc

[shonky]

I think given the popularity of Ritalin and Prozac, the suppression of emotion's already underway, and given that modern education seems to be based more on constant testing rather than asking questions, and the state of certain mass media that utilising the intellect may be on the wane. Don't think this has got anything much to do with authoritarianism though, just a lack of psychologists to deal with mental illness and a requirement of politicians to have some yardstick to measure how education is working from the standpoint of people that don't have the faintest clue how to measure intellectual ability in any other way (higher education doesn't really seem to be a great indicator of intelligence in my experience, although it does show a thirst for knowledge which is to my mind a far greater indicator).

Could also check this out, interesting stuff about Google, Loyalty cards and other uses of RFID in there.

In relation to the Google desktop

"We ask Google things that we would hesitate to ask anyone and Google remembers it all. Roger Clarke, an Australian specialist who lectures worldwide on “dataveillance”, is particularly critical of Google. The Google Desktop service, he says, is promoted as a device to search your own hard drive with no suggestion that Google can access the data:

“But the terms and conditions, as recently as March, contained no link to a privacy policy, which could be interpreted as enabling Google to use any personal data gathered from your hard drive as it sees fit, now or in the future.”

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/art ... 37531.html

It's quite worrying how pervasive this is, the fact that it's not even being used for any criminal surveillance mostly does rather make a mockery of the usual excuse "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" which is dished out whenever someone questions quite who needs this info. The NHS database that appears to be available to quarter of a million civil servants, private health care companies and their employees, and presumably insurance companies too does seem to be a bit unnecessary if your information can be requested from your local doctor by the relevant authorities. Certainly going to cost less that £12 billion to create and administer.

[thinking]

if you're genuinely worried about being tracked via RFID, better stop carrying large denomination $$$ bills (and Euros now have em too): http://www.prisonplanet.com/022904rfidtagsexplode.html

[bushby]

mobile phone tracking: http://www.geomobiles.net/

[[b]racket]

if you're genuinely worried about being tracked via RFID, better stop carrying large denomination $$$ bills (and Euros now have em too): http://www.prisonplanet.com/022904rfidtagsexplode.html

That goes for Londoners and their Oyster cards too...

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2004/02/f ... _card.html

[seckle]

if you're genuinely worried about being tracked via RFID, better stop carrying large denomination $$$ bills (and Euros now have em too): http://www.prisonplanet.com/022904rfidtagsexplode.html

you guys have had them for years. we just got them earlier this year. it's all new to us over here.