You can’t rack down the pet with the chip. You have to get right up to the pet and scan it. It is not a Lojack.
Cite that you can track a person by debit card.
We can’t perfectly enforce out laws. Sure, it makes sense at first. They’re laws! Of course they should be enforced!
But in fact, we are not wise or even responsible enough to pass perfectly-enforced laws. The difficulty in catching criminals today is part of a convoluted system that gets us to not pass laws except the ones that are truly valuable. Until we reach some sort of enlightenment, law enforcement must stay expensive and difficult.
People don’t understand this fact in quite these terms, so they’re more likely to phrase their objections in vague concepts of “privacy” and “liberty.” Values which on examination don’t exactly make sense. We’ve built a house on very shaky ground.
See, I’m not so sure. A cohesive system would be near impossible to just “hack” by a criminal. What is “hacking” today? Noone goes into a bank account and adds money. It’s much more round-about, involving stealing CC numbers, etc. Straight-up hacking the system to put money in your account is near-impossible. Like I said, we’ve already long lived under electronic money so we’re not imagining a very different future.
Paper money is subject to fraud, but by hacking I just mean any form of fraud to take other people’s money or add money (possibly fictitious money) to your own account.
If someone steals your wallet they steal some money, but not much. If they break into your checking account you still have 401k, cash, other investments, equity, etc. However with a single chip your assets will all be in one place and I think people would feel more vulnerable because of it.
I’m currently reading Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser and he discusses the issue of how big the “undergound” economy is. Short answer - real big. One way this invisible economy is measured is by tracking how large the known economy is and then comparing it to the amount of currency in circulation (and I realize money and currency are not the same). A certain percentage of currency circulates within the mainstream economy and its presense is recorded and accounted for. But a lot of currency essentially disappears - it’s being circulated among people who are not using it in the mainstream economy.
(As an aside, Schlosser wrote that the American hundred dollar bill has been the favorite banknote of off-the-book financial transactions for decades. But it’s now being eclipsed by the 500 Euro note, which is considered as stable and acceptable as the $100 note but has the advantage of having a significantly higher value making concealing or transporting a large sum easier.)
Isn’t there a 1000 Euro note?
It would be impossible to secure the digital money system as a whole well enough to justify the loss of privacy. All it would take are a few compromised chip-readers (the things every merchant would have at the register to take money from people) and all of a sudden money is moving from one account to another like freaking magic.
It is impossible to completely secure anything, hardware or software, that the enemy has physical possession of; at best, you can make it so the cost of breaking the device is higher than the benefits that would accrue from a break.* This would be impossible if the machine could, in theory, print money.
*(This isn’t perfect, though: Some people take great joy in breaking devices, which makes a mockery of this economic rationality. I’m certain some people would take great joy in breaking any point-of-sale chip reader design.)
I’m not followig this thread. What is the OP asking exactly?
Is he saying money should have chips in it? Or is he saying get rid of money and use what amounts to a debit card?
What exactly do you mean by tracked. That the transaction has a written record, or that the chip in the money or card serves as some kind of a device that could locate you?
I can tell you from the Chicago Transit which used RFID devices for their smart card, they are awful. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve boarded a bus and it won’t work. Then the next bus it works fine. Then it doesn’t. It’s so unreliable I went back to the other kind of transit pass.
An embedded chip that can locate a person is easy to overpower with other radio signals.
Remember how the dictatorship took over in The Handmaid’s Tale? Centralizing the economy that much could help middle-aged men get three-ways! (My knee jerk :D, after a nanosecond turned to :eek:. Let’s not use the chips.)
Well I didn’t mean you could track them like a lojack, but with different levels of equipment you can track from different distances. Maybe not by satellite but from 100 feet away with sensitive enough equipment.
The range on passive RFID is measured in inches, occasionally a few feet. It would be no more useful for tracking you than a credit card transaction.
I personally like the idea, then again I am a techie and it sounds cool to me.
The RFID units could be set to be associated by a bank to an account number just like an ATM card. RFID tracking numbers could be associated with existing state ID cards for high value transactions
Yeah, but even though I have a debit card I still have the option to use cash to make an anonymous purchase if I so choose. What you’re suggesting is to take that freedom away. I would rather the bad guys get away with their shenanigans than to have my privacy and liberty compromised.
http://www.iautomate.com/r500sp.html
According to the marketing materials this machine can read an RFID chip at 450’. That’s say, 45 car lengths from anyone you want to follow for instance.
It works fine today. You have a web of trust. I mean, think of a credit card scanner. That’s much more “dangerous.” If you have one, you can feed CC numbers into it all day and pocket the money. Except it’s not so easy to get away with it. Each CC reader is controlled. Each CC reader is tracked. Each transaction is transparent. Abnormal activity shows up quickly and is shut down. Also, any account you transfer money to can be dipped in to pull the money back.
The system works today, and if you add some draconian touches (like tracking the chip’s position 24/7 to prevent a clone being activated somewhere), the system will be downright impenetrable. (Except in the case of some huge inside conspiracy, although even that could be checked-and-balanced with a bit of decentralization.)
You really can’t attack a frightening techno-future from the angle of, “it won’t work.” Security doesn’t work today only because we don’t want to resort to real, foolproof security measures. (The ones that work are the very same ones that scare us.)
Worse: You can also potentially activate chips (and hence take cash) from that distance. Even without it… well, have you noticed that you don’t always have to sign or put in a debit code for small transactions? Well, imagine someone walking through the mall and taking $6.24 from everyone he passes. You could make more in a half-hour than most people can make in a week. And if they “officially” name the device encoder right, few if any of those people will ever realize they’ve been defrauded. I mean, how people will note a single charge from from Starbucks? And organized crime can and will figure out how to cheat these things. It’s a multi-multi-billion dollar industry, and theire just itching to take you for a ride.
Missed this before.
What is the civil liberty being violated by putting computer chips in currency? Are you talking a specific Constitutional right or just a general “MYOB” principle?
Yes, that’s a very valid concern.
From a civil liberties perspective, what about logging your position based on being read at a toll booth, or when stopped at a stop light, or when going through a speed trap. You could very easily, and very cheaply track the entire populace that way.
A “decoder” is not a device that exists in isolation, able to take money from any passing RFID. It is a dumb client that has to talk with bank servers to do anything. The bank servers will stop your little scheme quickly, and then the police will go after whoever signed their name to be granted a decoder license in the first place.
Actually that’s already being done. Especially at toll booths. Haven’t you heard of EZ-Pass (or similar)? Some states are even shutting down cash-based toll booths.
I meant embedding the chip in the person’s body, not currency.