Guidelines for RFID Privacy

Harriet Pearson,  Vice President, IBM Corporate Affairs & Chief Privacy Officer

I wanted to alert people to a story in the May 1 NYTimes that describes a new set of guidelines for best practices around RFID technology and privacy.

RFID has implications for healthcare across many fronts, such as in home health monitoring systems, pharmaceutical tracking or reducing medication errors in hospitals.  But RFID technologies have been somewhat slowed by consumer wariness about how their privacy might be affected by "smart tags" in everyday items such as clothing or supermarket goods.

For more than a year, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a public interest group in Washington, DC, has been developing guidelines for RFID best practices.  IBM has been a member of the CDT's best practices working group, along with Proctor & Gamble,  the National Consumers League, General Motors, Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others.

These guidelines represent the first time a consumer/industry coalition has worked together to agree on how to enable privacy in light of increasing use of sensors and RFID solutions.

While not everyone involved in the development of the guidelines agreed with the end results, this work does represent a critical mass of support for some fundamental best practices. Some of those principles:

• RFID use should be transparent to the end consumer (and thus those that have the direct relationship with consumers should notify consumer of such use)
  

• Consumers should have choice to opt out of additional uses of personal information collected by RFID

• Organizations such as IBM, who are upstream of the consumer interaction, should also do our part by encouraging such consumer notification and choice.

To these ends, IBM has developed an  RFID design for a "clipped tag" that contains a disabling feature that limits the chip's ability to broadcast its signature. We've also developed an internal set of best practices for our client-facing teams.

Finally, these guidelines are an interim draft. The broad healthcare ecosystem of providers, patients, employers and all other interested parties should become part of the process for refining and extending this first iteration.

And that process can begin here. Are there other principles or practices that you believe should be included in the next revision? Please share your comments here, and tell others about these guidelines.

IBM HealthNex Privacy RFID

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