Brussels Declares Its Hand : Will Recommendations Stamp On The Green Sprouts Of The RFID Economy?

The EU has finally got around to publishing its recomendations on protecting citizens' privacy when RFID is implemented.

For those suffering from insomnia, here is the complete recommendation.

The essence though is:

• operators of RFID systems will need to assess their potential impact on privacy and will have to protect the public against possible privacy invasions, including monitoring and reviewing protective measures.

• they will have to submit their assessments to a monitoring authority 6 weeks prior to deployment.

• they will be obliged to inform individuals of the presence of RFID readers by agreed signage.

• they will have to inform individuals of the presence of tags placed on or embedded in products.

• in retail applications operators will also be required to deactivate or remove tags at the point of sale unless the assessment indicates that the data held or derivable from the presence of the tag does not constitute a threat to privacy or personal data protection.

Although the recomendations recognise the difference between retail / mass market applications of RFID and others, it is clear that this affect deployments of RFID within businesses with an additional impact on the effort needed to deploy RFID based applications.

Here's our own thoughts on the privacy issue and a fact sheet on the EU recomendations.