I studied these things when I was working on my senior project. I think the most telling line was: 'The tags only respond when near a special reader device.' They do mean near. When you walk out of a Target or Borders through those arches, they are doing the same thing. You are walking through an elctro-magnetic radio field which will sense a tag that has a magnetic charge, which should be deactivated by a stronger field at the checkout. You have all seen these tags, they aren't tiny and all they do is hold a charge. I cannot imagine that these tags will be smaller, at least initially, because they have to do so much more.
My main point is that these devices aren't going to be picked up by a sensor that you drive by. The police, or worse a tellemarketer, won't be able to scan your entire house or car and know what you have. Now they could probably scan a garbage bag but if you are worried about that then maybe you are a little too paranoid. Also remember that the ID tag isn't going to store individual product information, like what store it was bought at or when it was made. The tag is only going to have company and product info. And as the article does state stores could do most of what the auto-id tags promise with their bar-code scanners but don't. A friend is a manager in a brand-new retail store and he still walks up and down isles looking for items low on hand, they still do store wide inventory every three months. Very low tech. One last thing: the article makes a statement about AUTO-PASS and speeding tickets. This rumor was flying around here when AUTO-PASS came to the PA turnpike. Some people even claimed to get a speeding ticket from this, but for some reason couldn't actually show it to you. The paper published an article about it and the company emphatically stated that they do not use it to pass along speeding violations, and said that none of the other companies in the field do either. A hoax reviled? Kevin T.
