At a world internet summit in Geneva last week, the badges contained RFID tags, according to this Washington Post story.
"During the registration process, we requested information about the future use of the picture and other information that was taken, and the built-in functionalities of the seemingly innocent plastic badge. No public information or privacy policy was available upon our demands that could indicate the purpose, processing or retention periods for the data collected. The registration personnel were obviously not properly informed and trained," the report said.
This is another badly written story.
It would have been much better if they had ommited the RFID part. The concerns expressed in the story have to do with the use of the data collected (and not how the data was collected).
My personal opinion (as a participant to WSIS 2004) is that the use of RFID tags made the security lines move much faster. Offcourse the same effect could have been achieved with magnetic stripe readers or a barcode scanner (probably less reliably).
The essence of the story lies in the absence of a clearly communicated privacy policy and the attempt to spice it up with the RFID dimension really spoils the dish at the end....
The press release upon which the WP story seems to have been based has a few more details:
http://www.nodo50.org/wsis/
How many of the supposedly technologically sophisticated delegates were actually aware of the RFID technology in their badges ?
Posted by: Watching Them, Watching Us at December 16, 2003 02:33 AM