Legislative updateStates choose their own paths in regulating RFID

Thanks to Kathleen Carroll of Irvine, California-based HID Global and the editors of SecurityInfoWatch for providing an interesting summary of pending state legislation of concern to the RFID industry. As an executive in one of the leading smart card and access control firms, Carroll does not disguise her opposition to government regulation, even go so far as to quote Alfred FK Laffer. But if her account is biased, it nevertheless provides a useful overview of creeping legal issues at the state level, and even Carroll realizes the limits of advocacy. In California, for instance, SB 362 “prohibits a person from forcing another individual to have an identification device surgically implanted — a prohibition most Americans would support wholeheartedly,” she concedes.

The issuees are myriad. Another California bill, SB 388, would require merchants to provide specific technical information about the RFID frequencies and ecryption systems being used. This would have obvious intellectual property implications. Massachusetts’s HB 261 “will require commercial entities that use [RFID] “to use signs to inform consumers of the presence and the purpose of the system and its components. In addition, businesses must label any products containing RFID tags.” In New Hampshire, lawmakers are considering requiring employers “to affix a label to access control cards that use radio frequency technology [and] restrict state departments and agencies in their uses of radio frequency-based systems.”

-read more in Kathleen Carroll’s SecurityInfoWatch analysis