Associated Press is reporting that the South Dakota Animal Industry Board is developing a new animal identification system to track cattle. The mandatory national ID system is being put in place to protect the nation’s livestock industry from serious disease outbreaks. They plan on clipping RFID tags to the cows ears to track their movements. (Cows always have been a bit shady in my opinion; it’s about time we start tracking them).
And hey, wouldn’t you know it, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced last week that more than $11 million in grants will go to South Dakota and 28 other state and tribal projects to facilitate such tracking. Damn, I will clip a RFID tag to my ear and let the government track me for $11 million bucks. Hell, I’ll do it for just $50 bucks a week. In the meantime, who will stand up for these cows’ privacy rights! (Does EPIC have a white paper out on this yet?)
Seriously, though, my colleague Jim Harper has a nice paper out on “RFID Tags and Privacy: How Bar-Codes-on-Steroids Are Really a 98-Lb. Weakling.” Check it out. This is going to be a hot debate in coming years since the privacy fanatics are going to scream bloody murder as more corporations start rolling out RFID-enabled services and technologies. Again, it’s important we understand the difference between private sector vs. public sector uses of such technologies. See this other recent piece by Harper to see what I mean.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.