Andover resident at forefront of RFID technology

Andover resident Michael Ohanian is at the forefront of a new technology that has businesses buzzing but privacy advocates worried.

Radio Frequency Identification tags, better known as RFIDs, may be nearly invisible to the typical consumer, but they are in more places than most people could possibly imagine. They're in car keys, passports, Exxon/Mobil Speedpasses. Highway EZ-Passes.

RFIDs are microchips with miniature antennae that broadcast information about you or the product you are using to electronic readers linked to computer databases that hold even more information about you or that product.

For businesses, the chips hold the promise of great efficiencies. For instance, the technology can monitor inventory, quickly feeding information into a computer database that alerts store managers when they are running low on Pampers, razors or just about anything else.

But privacy advocates are concerned that unscrupulous companies could track items from store shelves to kitchen cabinets, keeping a dossier on consumers that includes even the most private details of their lives through their buying habits.

Despite the debate, RFID technology, in one form or another, is here to stay. And, experts say, it will only become more prevalent as the cost of buying and installing RFID tags, readers and associated software continues to drop.

Anticipating this, Merrimack College in North Andover recently opened a lab to train students how to use the technology.

"There are not enough people out there with knowledge of this technology," said Ohanian, an RFID consultant who helps coordinate the new curriculum.

Ohanian said companies donated equipment to the college lab, aiming for "first dibs" on graduates.

"If I had 50 students trained in RFID, I could get them all jobs," he said.

What Ohanian and others hope the students will learn is not only how to use the technology, but how to come up with innovative ways to apply it.

At Merrimack College last year, electrical engineering students enrolled in the RFID course undertook special projects. Peter DePaola, 20, of Connecticut, a senior this fall, worked with another student on how the technology could enhance efficiency in the college library.

Tags would be glued to the inside of a book. When a person checks it out using a library card, the information about the book would be automatically logged into the computer using an RFID tag-reader.

If the book were brought back after hours, tag readers in the book-return slot could automatically register in the librarian's computer that the book was sitting in the return bin. Librarians using portable RFID readers that resemble small paddles could easily find the book and put it back on the shelf.

DePaola's study showed that if the thousands of books in the collection were chipped, and the school purchased the reading devices and software to manage the system, the investment would pay for itself inside of five years.

"I never thought about how much the library spends on late books, mis-shelving and taking time to find books," said DePaola, who previously worked in the library. "It's amazing how much RFID would save. There would be better security for books, plus you know where books are and can find them much faster."

The library and the school are considering whether to implement RFID in its books.

Technology has been around

While the technology would be new at Merrimack, it has been around for many years for other uses. People have put chips in their pets for at least 10 years. And ranchers have been tagging the ears of cows for even longer.

"What you're really worried about are fatal health issues," he said. "If disease does get transmitted, we want to be able to isolate those incidents. You can track its history to see when and where it was infected with disease."

Tracking people

While many understand the benefits of tracking products or produce, the idea of using RFID tags to monitor people becomes fraught with privacy concerns.

Since last August, every U.S. passport given out by the government contains an RFID chip hidden in the back cover. The chips contain exactly the same information found on the information page of the passport, such as name, date of birth and gender, as well as a digital image of the passport holder.

Eight to nine million RFID-enabled passports have been distributed to date, including 2 million last month alone.

When it was originally proposed, the so-called "e-passport" met with stiff resistance from privacy advocates.

One criticism was that people could steal information from the tag by "skimming," using an RFID reader to gather information off the chip as a person walks by. As a result, the government inserted metallic cloth into the front and back covers of passports, Royster said. That's why Customs agents need to open the booklet to read the information.

In addition, some 20 million credit cards have been distributed recently, embedded with personal information. And Washington state is conducting a pilot program to put RFID tags on driver's licenses. And the federal government continues mulling over how it's going to implement the Real ID Act, a federal law signed by President Bush in 2005 with enforcement slated to start in 2009.

Among the many proposals contained in the act is a requirement that state driver's licenses become a sort of de facto national ID card, complete with an RFID card with all sorts of personal information.

And it may seem like science fiction, but recently , the chips have been implanted in humans, making it possible to track, for instance, Alzheimer's patients. And they are now in credit cards, passports and some driver's licenses, leaving open the possibility that criminals could take advantage of potential security vulnerabilities and steal personal information.

Katherine Albrecht, a Nashua, N.H., author and privacy activist, has a doctorate from Harvard University and co-wrote the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID."

She said she has been waging a war against what she calls "human implantation."

A company called VeriChip Corp., of Delray Beach, Fla., has been creating chips for animals for more than a decade. Recently, the company began pushing the idea of implanting the chips in people with diseases like Alzheimer's.

For someone suffering from Alzheimer's or any other disease that may lead the person to wander away from a medical facility, the chips could be useful: As soon as a patient gets to a door equipped with an RFID reader, the door would lock and staff would be alerted.

But privacy activists have a number of problems with the practice.

"We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action -- some would even claim, our very thoughts -- will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., told the Associated Press.

Albrecht said she and other activists are calling for legislation to regulate who could be chipped.

A bill she hopes to have introduced in the Massachusetts Legislature would make it illegal to force someone to be implanted with a chip and would also make it illegal to put a chip in someone under the age of 18 or who was not "of sound mind."

"It's not like Nazi Germany where you can see the guy with jackboots. Here, unbeknownst to you, a reader is picking up a signal," she said. "It's in the wall or in the floor, having been quietly slipped into the environment. It's tracking you and you'll never know it's there."

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