Radio Frequency ID is the wave of the future! And by future I mean now! That’s right! Very soon, every passport issued by the US government will have a RFID chip with biometric and personal information on it. This is a terrible idea, but unfortunately a necessary one if we ever want to live in a cool future world like Minority Report or Demolition Man.

Passport RFID chips are incredibly small, contain personal information and can be read by a simple RFID chip reader. These readers are about as complicated as radios and are easily obtained by determined people. While our government touts the security of these new data chips, hackers have already cloned them, and copied information off of them. Real safe.

Another, more useful project for RFID would be to chip and help locate papers in a business setting. A company has thought up a novel way to find papers in offices loaded to the brim with stacks of documents in piles everywhere. the RFID staple! Yes, a chip that carries the information about the document, when it was printed and by whom. Great idea, but I propose taking it one step further. Chip the paper! I’m not sure if I’m the first, since I found several patents on RFID paper, but most are ambiguous.

Just to get you a little more paranoid, Hitachi has come up with RFID ‘powder.’ RFID chips that are .05 square millimeters! Smaller than salt and pepper, thiner than a human hair and full of your personal information! Here is a picture to give you the scale.

that line is a human hair!

What are some good uses for RFID tags you have heard of?