Don't Borrow a Terrorist's Sweater

Howard Rheingold, in his interview with Jesse Walker, expounds the virtues of cheap, miniscule microchips placed on products. Consumers would be able to read information from those chips with portable computers and could make better decisions with access to peer reviews and general manufacturers information.

"Every object has a story; it’s just that citizens and consumers don’t have access to what that story is. Soon we’re going to have lots of little chips in lots of things, and those chips are going to communicate, and we’re going to read information from those chips, and in some cases the chips can read information that we can send to them." -- Rheingold

While there are definite advantages to knowing whether a restaurant you’re about to walk into is well reviewed, the costs are greater.

Let’s say I buy a sweater encoded with a microchip. I can read other’s opinions of it, perhaps see if it is in any magazines and how it can be best combined with other clothes to make an outfit. And then I go home.

Will retailers or manufacturers be able to track where I go? Would they be able to cross-reference my sweater’s signals with other products I buy and build some sort of ChoicePoint database, a Machiavellian take on a grocery store’s loyalty discount card database? How would this information be regulated?

What would the government do with this information? I can just see an amendment to the Patriot Act allowing the government to summon my, or someone else’s sweater file, without a judge’s permission.

Maybe in the future we’ll have to be a little more careful about whose sweater we borrow.