Thanks for all the responses everyone. I do understand the technology, but didn’t want to turn this into a geek show, as i am interested in wheat Everyones’ take on this is.
One scenario I envisioned was theives driving by and scanning your trash/recyclables, and picking up information like - Ohh, looks like they just bought themselves a gadgetron 3000! We should drop in when they are least expecting us!
One positive application I could see is in bullets. Place the RFIDs in the bullet, and when you buy them, you sign something making you responsible for their safe/lawful use. Of course, people with bad intent would just get/make REFD free bullets…
Not in the context of your prior post. The range is far too limited for the degree of your paranoia. Residential walls and car bodies are significant obstacles to RFID. Could an RFID read tags in your clothing as you pass through a doorway, yes, getting a return off a tag in your bedroom through an exterior wall of a house from the street, not gonna happen.
Possibly, however if they’re durable enough to survive processing/embedding into paper, they might well be durable enough to survive the breakdown of that paper, but my point was really that if they become truly ubiquitous, this could become an impediment to their efficient use.
Without turning this into a gun thread, the problem with this is that the forces exerted on a bullet are almost unimaginable, getting solid state electronic devices of any kind to survive thatis AFAIK impossible. Imbedding tiny metal flakes with a code etched on it would be far more likely to survive, but then you end up with issues involving correlation of purchased bullets and their owners.
Who do we let maintain that database? Reporting of stolen bullets? Returning your duds/misfires so the bullet could not be pulled and reloaded into a fresh cartridge?
Introducing the Federal Department of Bullet Tracking…
Even if you have the equipment to read the chips through walls, they seem to be intended more for in the packaging or tags of consumer merchandise than in the object itself. So, they won’t know all of the electronics you have, but if, as Full Metal Lotus mentioned, they drive by at just the right time, they can see what containers you recently threw away.