There does seem to be a lot of passion when RFID comes up.
But it's funny. A lot of these discussions get very holy and people pace back and forth and give their speeches, but they keep stepping over this dead horse in the middle of the room. It turns out that most of us are living some aspect of our life slightly outside the law. Maybe I drive a little bit over the speed limit. There are people who take aggressive positions on their taxes. There are lots of people who do something that by the letter of the law is not legal, and frankly, they don't want to get caught. We can turn this into a very, very holy speech on privacy instead of discussing whether maybe we shouldn't speed or maybe the speed limits should be higher.
And in some cases it's just people not understanding, I hear a lot of concerns about RFID where people worry about being scanned and someone getting all their personal details. No, they will get a 91-bit number. Now all they have to do is hack into 17 different databases to find out anything about you.
People are afraid someone will drive by their house and scan everything in it. No, if they had a scanner powerful enough to do that, your fear should be being cooked in your own home.
When we get enough sensors planted out there in the world, what are they going to do? A lot of people like Dust Networks and Crossbow are employing them to reduce energy consumption in buildings.
We've described it as creating a virtual double. If I get enough feeds from enough different directions, I can start to construct virtual versions of every physical and real object on the planet, and with those I will actually have more information and control than I have if I confront the object itself.
So, for example, if you confront a printer, you can figure out right away whether it has paper or toner and whether or not it's working. But if you stayed at your desk, and there was a virtual double, you could have had those two facts, plus you could see that some idiot sent a 5,000 slide PowerPoint [presentation] to that printer.
What other novel applications for this sort of thing do you see out there?
One shopping mall has a billboard that's listening to the leakage off FM antennas of the cars driving by. From that it can determine what people are tuned to. Now, there is a privacy issue, but I don't know...
