Back in 1991, in the evening after a long day at classes at UC Santa Cruz,
and after a trip to Safeway with some roommates, we started talking about
how every product these days has a unique identifier attached, readable by
simply scanning the UPC code.

Influenced as college students tend to be, we tried to extrapolate to gain
a vision of the future, and what we saw were Americans everywhere, walking
around and conducting normal business, with UPC codes burned on their 
foreheads. The codes would have to be on a part of the body one couldn't
remove, we reasoned. 

Everyone would be trackable and identifiable. There would be UPC scanners 
everywhere we went: grocery stores ("hello Mr. McNett, glad to see you again. 
How are those Trojan ribbed condoms you purchased last week working for you?"), 
banks ("at your income level, we can make a special offer today"), and airports 
("stop that man, he's a United frequent flyer but now he's flying American").

It was all very funny, and great belly laughs were had by all. There were
underlying privacy concerns, of course, but none of us thought that any self-
respecting American citizen would ever concede to having a UPC code burned on
their forehead. I mean, Americans are patriotic but we have our limits. So,
our privacy is safe, we thought.

We were wrong. 

Technology is amazing, and I am hooked. Did you know that we now have the 
capability of putting a unique identifier (an electronic UPC code) into a
chip the size of a grain of salt, and injecting that under the skin to be
accessed without our knowledge at grocery stores, banks, and airports?

The technology is known as RFID (Radio Frequency ID), and is being harnessed
at all levels of the supply chain: warehouses tag their boxes and pallets,
Walmart tags its products, ranchers tag their cattle. Think how easy it will
be to track inventory in a retail store or warehouse when everything is tagged,
and the computer system knows when a given box leaves or enters the room. In
other words, this is great technology that will revolutionize how business 
processes are implemented.

However, I find myself wanting to call up my old buddies Timothy, Rob, Chad
and Steven to discuss this UPC-Branding on the forehead thing. It isn't that
the government will one day mandate that everyone gets tagged. No, that would 
cause too much of an uproar. What will more likely occur is that as the 
technology gets integrated into our culture and society, we ourselves will
individually come to rely on it, and accept it. It will be very convenient to
walk up to an ATM and not have to enter a PIN - just ask for cash and your
account is properly debited with no further interaction needed.

When we go to get government services, register for school or visit the hospital,
we'll be offered the opportunity to get an injection so that we don't have to stand
in line next time. Pretty soon, the majority of us will have these tags in our
bodies - perhaps many dozens of them - and we'll see it as normal and not worry
about it.

Is this what we want?

© 2004 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Opinion] permanent link