Education And Public Policy: Interview With Kathleen Carroll, HID Global

Reprinted from RFID Connections with permission from AIM Global. AIM Global, the trade association for the Automatic Identification and Mobility industry, is the source for technically accurate, unbiased, commercial-free, and up-to-date information on all AIM technologies. For additional information, please visit www.aimglobal.org.

RFID Connections interviewed Kathleen Carroll, director of government relations for HID Global and a Certified Information Privacy Professional, about factors influencing legislative policy makers and industry response. Carroll speaks on the industry's concern for RFID invading personal privacy. She also addresses what she thinks are some of the biggest challenges the industry is facing at the policy level going into 2008.

RFID Connections: When it comes to public policy, opponents of RFID have raised their concerns about RFID's possible effects on personal privacy. How real are those concerns and what is the industry doing to address them?

Kathleen Carroll: Many of the privacy advocates and policy makers have raised such issues as the ability to read an RFID tag surreptitiously, the ability to read that tag from as far as 60 feet away -- those concerns are not, from a technology perspective, really valid at this point in time. Most of the technology that's out there now cannot be read from as far away as 60 feet. In fact, most of the technology that's in use now, for example, in access control cards, can only be read from mere inches away.