On the moral basis for privacy protection.
Just read an interesting paper on the Internet of Things and privacy by Jeroen van der Hoven and Pieter Vermaas. According to them, privacy regulation is justified, because it aims to reach the following moral goals.
Why the Privacy Coach runs on NFC
Today someone asked me why the Privacy Coach is built on NFC while all stores use EPC tags that are UHF? As a result, the Privacy Coach is of limited practical use.
There are actually two reasons for that.
First, the purpose of the demo is to show the potential application of mobile devices to help protect your privacy, in particular a Privacy Coach that helps people to manage their privacy in a world full of RFID tags. Mobile phones are the natural choice as a platform because they are protable and quite personal devices, that you carry with you all the time. Unfortunately, the only RFID interface supported by (actually a quite limited set of) mobile phones is NFC.
Second, it provides a glimpse of the future. It shows that new applications of mobile phones in the Internet of Things are possible, if only mobile phones and EPC tags could communicate with each other. Thus the Privacy Coach also serves as an incentive for either EPC to move to HF (the frequency used by NFC), or for NFC to accept UHF. Actually EPC is considering such a move to HF.
Seminar IFIP WG 11.2 on Pervasive Systems Security
Monday, June 7, the first IFIP WG 11.2 seminar on “Pervasive Systems Security” took place in Istanbul. There were a few interesting talks and observations, that I want to discuss here.
Push-to-talk button for RFID
Basic RFID tags, like EPC Global tags, store a unique number that is broadcast whenever they come within reading range of an arbitrary reader. This poses some privacy threats because if you carry a tag with you all the time, the same serial number will show up at all the readers you pass. Today at the RFIDSec 2010 workshop I learnt that secret handshakes (See Czeskis et. al.) are an active area of research in RFID security. The aim is to provide some context to an RFID tag that will allow the tag to decide whether to talk or not.
leave a comment