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Leader: RFID in prisons - does anyone care?
Or is this a group not privy to the privacy debate?

By silicon.com

Published: Monday 02 August 2004

US prisons have started using RFID chips to keep track of prisoners, protect staff and increase security.

To date this technology has been mired in privacy concerns. Most notably, German shoppers have taken to the streets to protest their shopping habits being tracked via RFID and silicon.com readers have voiced their own fears over whether schoolchildren should be tagged.

So in some ways it makes sense that RFID is taking hold in a population which has, at best, limited rights of privacy.

Some may argue that this is right and good. Convicted criminals have broken laws and thus do not deserve the right to privacy earned by law-abiding citizens.

Admittedly, the uses of RFID in one Ohio prison do not sound overly invasive - prisoners will wear RFID transmitters on their wrists and staff will wear them on their belts so their location within prison grounds can be tracked. If prisoners try to remove their transmitter or warders are knocked down, computers will be alerted.

Compare this to US hospitals' plans to implant chips in the arms of patients and staff.

Opponents of RFID often cite they object to supermarkets and potentially all businesses as well as the government being able to track where they are. At the moment, that simply doesn't happen. Most commercially available RFID systems aren't designed to locate people - they track items over metres, not individuals over countries.

The Ohio system, however, is a real departure for tracking technology - it's specifically meant to pinpoint people in a location and report their movements to an authority. So should we be worried?

There are surely benefits to using RFID in prisons, such as protecting guards from violence and giving wardens the ability to run a tighter ship.

We don't know yet whether this practice will be taken up in UK prisons as well nor how the UK population would react to it.

But it seems this is one use of a potentially invasive technology that won't spawn too much concern. Shoppers - you have every right to keep your brand of laundry detergent secret. Criminals, however, should get used to one more way of being watched.