WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?

 

RFID tagging is the next generation in safety and convenience. Tags expedite financial transactions, speed our way through passport control, and accelerate toll collection on the turnpike.

The government will tell you that RFID adds a layer of security to your identification. The tag in your passport (and soon to be in your driver’s license) is like a digital fingerprint—a supplement to the picture and signature on the ID. Simply by adding a new layer of technical sophistication, passports become slightly more difficult to counterfeit. A stolen passport cannot simply be cut up and pasted back together to create a usable forgery.

Retailers and manufacturers want to know as much as they can about you. Most data available to marketers is aggregate—data generated by tracking entire populations. A marketer can predict with reasonable certainty what a group of seventeen-year-olds might do, but the behavior of an individual seventeen-year-old is just as opaque to the marketing director of American Eagle Outfitters as it is to the rest of us.

RFID makes profiling individual consumers cheap and easy. Marketers will track you as closely as possible, by any means at their disposal, because they want you to buy more of whatever it is they have to sell. If detergent companies could keep track of how dirty your clothes are, they would. If cosmetics companies could inject something into your skin to track its moisture level, they would. With RFID, they will soon be able to do these things and more.

The possibilities go way beyond what we currently think of as advertising. Given the ability to track your movements and record your spending, marketers can immerse you in a nonstop barrage of targeted marketing—an envelope of refined messaging made just for you. A walk through the mall could be an unbroken string of free offers, unbeatable deals, and seamless shopping. If you’re not in the mood to be advertised to, that’s just fine—that’s useful data, too.