>>45
An as EEfag who has actually made an RFID-tag reader I can safely say that you're a moron. Now the first problem of course is distance. RFID-tags work by induction, meaning you have two inductors (antennae) that are designed for a specific placement. Mine for example was designed for parallel placement. One antenna has an AC current running through it at high voltage. This induces power into the inductor in the tag. The tag then returns a signal which is received as an amplitude modulation that can be extracted with a simple envelope detector.
Now the problem with distance here is that the tag needs to be physically close in order to receive any power as the E field will decrease by something like d^4. The other is the interference. The RFID data structure is designed to carry 40 bits of information in 10 rows of 4 bits with one bit of parity per row, one bit of parity per column and one 9-bit row of ones to indicate the beginning (a sequence that can't appear anywhere else) and a single one to terminate. The first 8 bits are the customer ID and the remaining 32 are the data. This is transferred as a manchester encoded signal which means it's self-synchronizing. Now what do you think happens when you have two cards in range? They fuck up your envelope detector and you can read exactly zero of them (save for statistical luck).
The other problem with "all the stuff that will be stored on them" is that you literally have only 32 bits to do it in, which means it can barely even be used for identification, since it can't even represent every person on the planet if we're all using the same type of tag. Then there's the generational problem where 300 million people of the US will be replaced over time with new people, exhausting the system in a very short amount of time. Especially if you're reserving bits for useless shit. And you know that recycling IDs will just result in chaos.
Then of course you come to tracking. Here the gummiment would need to set up readers EVERYWHERE in order to get you. This could be done I suppose, except they'll only get a fraction of people in busy places. However when you think about it, you're already being tracked. Everywhere you use a credit card. Every time you "check in" to something. Every time you walk into a place with camera surveillance. You're being tracked fucking everywhere already. Hell the US military can get a live video feed of you from space if it's not particularly cloudy where you are.
I'm all for privacy, but this will literally have no effect on it. It is however a massive security concern if they start implementing it as persistent identification for things like banks. There can be no encryption with this shit, since encrypting the data doesn't protect it from being copied. There's no challenge-response. The correct way to crusade for privacy would be to dismantle the already existing tracking infrastructure.