Are you a privacy victim? Part 6

Have you ever sat in the slow lane at a border crossing because you were afraid that the government put a chip in the border crossing card that would allow anyone to track you?  Did you ever wait at the border behind someone like that -- maybe someone who'd read this scary story about the technology.  Well, you're a privacy victim too.

Privacy groups are making a big fuss about RFID chips in passports and passport cards, trying to stop adoption of the technology (and working with some companies who've invested heavily in other technology).  But in the end the worst that can be said about RFID in passports and passport cards is that they can be induced to release a unique number -- not a passport or credit card number, just a placeholder that allows the border computer system to recognize what passport is coming up.  So at most, they allow some remote sensing of people -- though rarely at distances where eyesight wouldn't work better and only if the people in question are carrying the passport card without putting it in a protective sleeve.

Is it the end of the world that this number can be extracted from the gear carried by insouciant individuals?  Well, quick, what's on your belt or in your purse?  If you have a cell phone in there, you already live in the frightening dystopia the privacy campaigners have conjured up for 2025, when RFID passports might be carried at any given time by at most 25% of the population.  Your cell phone not only has a unique ID, but it broadcasts that ID for miles.  Why would anyone build a machine to extract, maybe, a meaningless number when instead they could capture a cell phone number (and instead of hacking the border computer system to find out who they've identified, they could just, well, call up and ask "Who is this?")

Kudos to Gigi Zenk, the one person in this story who has a clue:

But Gigi Zenk, a spokeswoman for the Washington state Department of Licensing, says Americans "aren't that concerned about the RFID" in a time when "tracking an individual is much easier through a cell phone."