U.K. minister suggested RFID tags for Alzheimers patients
Malcolm Wicks sets off a civil liberties uproar; “tagging” may not be the most politically correct usage
More British biometric boorishness. Science Minister Malcolm Wicks last week suggested that Alzheimer patients be tagged with RFID buttons in order to keep track of them when they wander off — although he also emphasized that the government had no immediate plans to put such an initiative into action. Noting too that RFID was used to monitor such prosaic items as fruits and automobiles, Wicks suggested that his was a humane approach to a serious problem: “Should we not also use them for things which are socially more important?” he asked. “This is a realistic social concern. People may want this for a family member, and the family member may think it is appropriate.” More than 700,000 people in the United Kingdom suffer from various forms of dementia, and needless to say many civil liberties and patients rights groups were outraged by Wicks’s suggestion, especially by his comparison of people’s grandparents to commercial goods. “We absolutely would not want to characterise this as tagging,” said Paul Bates of the civil liberties campaign group Liberty.
