Social Networks Move Into Meatspace with "RFID Ecosystem"

Students at the University of Washington are about to begin a large-scale simulation of a future in which you and your items are tracked by tiny monitoring devices we know as RFID tags.

Volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building.
The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools.

As noted in the picture at right, this will make it much easier to keep track of your skateboard and other stuff ("Oh, dude, there's my car."). But the real reason for the RFID Ecosystem project is to explore the complications of pervasive surveillance of people and things, even if it is opt-in like current social networks Facebook or MySpace.

The researchers say they want to find the "balance between privacy and utility" in such a network and they are asking a lot of good questions:

Are there user-centered
RFID applications that are truely(sic) useful? If so, how can they be designed to minimize loss of privacy? Finally, if these applications are indeed useful, does the utility outweigh the potential loss of privacy?

RFID tags can be attached (or implanted) to anything or anybody, just ask WalMart, who sell a good percentage of everything and push their suppliers to use the tags. Basically, an RFID tag is a combination barcode and beacon that only RFID readers can see. Combined with large numbers of readers, the tags could create a continuously updating data stream that you could visualize into a SimCity-like representation of an area's goings on.

Wired icon Bruce Sterling has been all over the implications of RFID for a long time. Check out this Sterling talk, for example(s), or his series of posts about implanting RFID chips into people. It's not a crazy future or science fiction: the British government has proposed to insert chips into British prisoners.

In the past, I've written about natural and built environmental sensors, and wondered whether people should be included among the vital signs of an urban ecosystem. But I've skirted most of the privacy issues because I don't have great answers for you, so I'm happy to see that these researchers, led by Magda Balazinska, are trying to come up with good tech or policy solutions, as they put it,* "before such systems become commonplace*."

See Also:
Weaponizing the Climate: Geoengineering's Military Potential
Sensors of the Future Will Create the Matrix
[MIT Launches Pervasive Environmental Sensor Network](https://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/mit-launches-pe.html)