Scanning with a Purpose - Supporting the Fair Information Principles in RFID Protocols

Today’s RFID protocols that govern the communication between RFID readers and tags are solely optimized for performance, but fail to address consumer privacy concerns by supporting the fair information practices appropriately. In this paper we propose a feature set that future privacy-aware RFID protocols should include in order to support the fair information principles at the lowest possible level – the air interface between readers and tags – and demonstrate that the performance impact of such an extension would be within acceptable limits. We also outline how this feature set would allow consumer interest groups and privacy-concerned individuals to judge whether an RFID reader deployment complies with the corresponding regulations through the use of a watchdog tag.