I Think I'm Paranoid: RFID Is Pretty Scary

This story is not just a perfectly legitimate excuse to run a picture of Shirley Manson, it is quite scary. The Boston Globe, not usually known for tinfoil hattery, carries a story on RFID that's just pretty frightening. From the article:

Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers.

Wow.