Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags converge easy mega-information storage with smart, noninvasive telecommunications technologies. In our respective specialties, RFIDs simultaneously call to mind countless potential improvements in logistics. Here, we face a professional judgment call: Can we navigate RFID technology to ideal implementations that are moral, responsible, and purposeful?

Pottie rightly reminds us that applications of RFIDs bring predictable social disadvantages, shrinking the fuzzy spaces between democratic and totalitarian values. However, technologies used exclusively for utopian civilian purposes are a real historical anomaly, and opinions about privacy-encroaching technology developments are unfortunately commonplace milestones in our professional careers. Pottie’s viewpoint about RFIDs is seemingly long anticipated.

Pottie’s de facto notice of another impending societal intractability falls on our already numbed senses. We really should be aware of the factual basis of his concerns, and he politely sets off the alarm at a rational tone. But, really, we engineers have never been successful town criers of impending cultural crisis. So, colleagues, prepare for another familiar chorus of reproach. We all live in this same claustrophobic bandwidth of virtual pseudo-privacy, where Internet cookies and hyper-MIP powered processors standardize us to be responsible micro-Orwellian conformists. Frankly, we are also all wholeheartedly professionally contributing our best efforts to the advancement of homeland security. What good, then, are Pottie’s awesome cautions for creating legal limitations on another technology, already cascading from research and development to manufacturing and marketing? RFIDs are yet another unstoppable reality of globalization.