Controversy:

Supporter: People who believe in the benefits RFID technology can bring to the society.

Anti-Supporter: People who see privacy more importantly than the benefits RFID technology can bring to the society

Privacy is one central controversy on whether or not RFID should be greatly applied to daily life applications. Since RFID technology does not require RFID tag inserted into another system in order to access the information and all a person needs to read information from RFID tag is a RFID reader, this could mean that there are already people whose privacies are already endangered by people who has RFID readers. Let us take RFID books as an example. People who advocate RFID technology would say that RFID technology helps the transaction of borrowing and returning books a lot easier, faster. Moreover, the feature of automatic data collection RFID technology has help librarian get rid off all the paper works. However, people who against RFID technology would say that RFID tags sometimes contains people’s personal information. In the case of RFID books, they would think information from these RFID tags contains individuals’ book selections, which are considered as privacy. Applying RFID technology to the books simply give people who can access the RFID readers chances to read people’s personal information; therefore, we should get rid of RFID technology immediately. Also another RFID controversy involves in privacy sparked while an elementary school in California require students to wear RFID tags with their name, picture and grade on school property. Parents and civil liberties groups are concern about who has access to collected data. [7]

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