Tagged Humans Tracked By US University

Students, engineers and staff at the University of Washington (UW) will find out first hand what it means to be tracked by RFID in what UW researchers call "the next step in social networking". "Studies like this inevitably make [RFID people tracking] more likely to be taken up," said former Linux Australia president and technical director of Internet Vision Technologies Jonathan Oxer, who RFID-tagged himself voluntarily to investigate technical and privacy issues. At first mention, people tagging seems unusual and shocking, said Oxer, but after hearing about it more and more, it loses that edge. Recent research showed that over ten percent of new RFID projects involved people tagging. "It's a dangerous path to go down," admitted Oxer, who believes that at some point there will be a special case for tagging, such as child molesters, and it will move on from there. When the technology becomes good enough, he said, clandestine tracking efforts will become better. "If the tech is there then people will use it," he said.