The Pros And Cons Of RFID Chips

With today’s technological advancements powering forward with startling speed, it can quickly become difficult to pay attention to the minute details that surround and encompass everyday life. Everyone has seen Windows 10 and the new iPhone 6s+, but not many people have noticed the small and silent but (metaphorically) deadly technological “predators” that are spreading quickly throughout humanity: RFID chips. RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification. RFID is a small piece of equipment that utilizes electromagnetic fields to transfer data between the chip and a receiving device. General RFID chips are a breach of personal privacy and should not be used in any circumstance that involves humans. RFID chips have two different forms: the passive form and the active form. Passive RFID chips are the most commonly used form of RFID chips because of their inexpensive nature; however, these chips are tasked with the dependency of requiring a reader to access the information stored. Active RFID chips cost more to manufacture but have the ability to broadcast its own independent signal without the dependence of a reader. Because of the two types of chips, RFID have an extensive pallet of skills that could be utilized in many fashions. Under the category “RFID,” there are two distinct forms of usage: human application and animal application. Animal application bears a resemblance to the way RFID chips are used in humans in that an RFID chip can loosely be referred to as a “sophisticated dog tag.” For the purpose that RFID is applied to animals, this is the extent that it will be used for. Similar to current Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that are used on either exotic breeds of animals or for the rich people who have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it, RFID chips that are “Active” can be used as a relatively inexpensive way to track animals. For example, assuming that in a future time period every household was equipped with a RFID reader, an active tag for a dog could theoretically be assigned specific coordinates located as “home” relative to where this dog lives. If the dog were to step out of a certain boundary defined by his owners, his tag would begin to send out pulses of radio waves alerting any nearby neighbors that this dog is lost. Upon reaching the dog the RFID tag would send the coordinates of “home” to the neighbor’s reader and the neighbor would know where the dog lives. This neighbor could then retrieve contact info about the owners and could call them and tell them that he or she located their lost pet. Human application is a tad bit more complex, as humans are in essence the most diverse and unique species on the face of the Earth. Since the beginning of the 21st century RFID chips have been developed and incorporated into various pieces of equipment and items; however, primordial forms of readers were available exclusively to those who could afford …show more content…
With some simple modification, RFID chip readers have been developed to sense and track goods and supplies that have these chips sown inside the material. For example, some stores have implanted RFID chips into pieces of clothing so that not only can the store track the location of the apparel in case it was misplaced, but if the apparel happened to be in a customer’s hand as he or she walked by a modified TV in the store (a special model that had an RFID reader built into a sensor), the screen would instantly show more information about the piece of clothing in hand and more items that are directly related to that article of clothing (Halzack …show more content…
This means that is has no consciousness to be able to legislate whether or not the information it is transferring is important or private to the owner. As the RFID readers themselves are a piece of technology, they can inherently be enhanced to increase their capabilities. This may include, but it is not limited to: increased reading range, faster transfer rate, ability to bypass security, etc. Each of these increases the susceptibility of the normal population’s information to a private hackers reach, from issues as small from changing prices to grocery items to as large as tracking the lives of people with frighteningly specific