Alarm over shopping radio tags

While barcodes need to be manually scanned, RFID simply broadcasts its presence and data to electronic readers. Vint Cerf. ... one of the inventors of the internet ... now employed by Google... told Click: "What everybody worries about is that these identifiers will be used not to keep track of the object, but of the person associated with the object and then there's a Big Brother scenario that everybody worries about. ... Metro sees RFID working for it by having food traceable back to the farm, queues cut to nothing, and shelves that shout when they are empty.

... The fear is that what we buy will be forever linked to us. In the nightmare scenario, an innocently discarded soft drink can could end up in what later becomes a crime scene. RFID could open a whole new field of forensics where the tag on the can removes any reasonable doubt." - BBC