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Archive for the ‘RFID’


No RFIDs at SF Public Library

Published July 11th, 2005 in RFID | 1 Comment »

The San Francisco Budget Committee axed funding for the implementation of RFIDs at the San Francisco Public Library. (Link to story).

This reminded me of an interesting post on the LITA Blog on an RFID presentation at ALA. One of the speakers was Berkely Public Library director, Jackie Griffith.

Griffith says that a bigger intellectual freedom issue is access to information. Many public schools in Berkeley lack media specialists and 30% of Berkleyans do not have a computer at home. If there is such a concern that library rfid tags may be used by the government to interfere with things people read then the real question is what the government is doing. Griffith says that RFID has allowed the Berkeley Public Library to reopen on Sundays and to return their book purchasing budget to near normal levels.

I am not an expert on RFIDs, but I don’t really think it’s fair to pit one intellectual freedom issue with another, in order to sweep the “less pressing” issue under the rug. And I think it may also be short sighted to say that the use of technology has allowed the library to save money (and reopen on Sundays). The RFID implementation doesn’t deal with the underlying issue of library underfunding and thus has only postponed budget problems that are sure to reappear in the near future, as well as privacy issues, if RFIDs turn out to be not as safe as they ought to be.

ALA conference notables

Published July 4th, 2005 in RFID, conference, progressive librarians | 1 Comment »

I know this has made every listserv and LIS blog, but it’s worth mentionning again and again. The ALA council passed a resolution against the war in Iraq. It is wonderful news indeed, although, I think it’s over 2 years too late. The Librarians for Peace called for this type of resolution back in 2003:

One would think that the American Library Association (ALA) given an opportunity to express its opposition to what was declared to be imminent war, given an opportunity to protest at least the gross misallocation of the US’ own resources which this fantastically expensive war was known to entail, at a time when it was also known that our deficits were already skyrocketing and that our social, health and educational (including library) sectors were being savagely slashed, that - if not for moral reasons, for purely practical reasons - the American Library Association at its mid-winter 2003 conference in Philadelphia would have stood up and opposed the war.

Instead its Council and Executive consciously refused to oppose the war against Iraq, refused to embrace even a tepid, least-common-denominator resolution, based on self-interest alone, created to allow it to ’say no to war’!

GAO warns against RFIDs

Published June 23rd, 2005 in RFID | 5 Comments »

The Government Accountability Office has released a study providing an overview of RFID technology, discussing security, and privacy issues. Not surprinsingly, it has found that:

The use of tags and databases raises important security considerations related to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data on the tags, in the databases, and in how this information is being protected. (…)

Key privacy concerns include notifying individuals of the existence or use of the technology; tracking an individual’s movements; profiling an individual’s habits, tastes, or predilections; and allowing for secondary uses of the information.

[beSpacific]