This privacy invasion is billed as a replacement for bar codes in inventory and automated checkout. People shudder at what this will do to privacy. If a person's shoes can be tracked, the person can be tracked. If what a person reads can be tracked, so can what he thinks. The dangers in a commercial setting are manifold. It is impossible to tell who is reading the tag, when it is being read, and who is interested in the information about where you go and what you buy. In library books there is one crucial difference: When you buy a commercial product with an RFID tag, you have the right to discard it, if you can find it. In a library book, you are obligated to leave it in the book. It follows the book through repeated borrowings. If someone who is under suspicion checks out a book, you can be linked to that person by borrowing the same book. The loss of privacy is subtle and gradual. Small bits of privacy are lost gradually over a period of time, and soon the people have no privacy left.

This proposal is being driven by economic forces and commercial interests. The library attempted to bury the conversion to RFID in another proposal and push it through without public discussion. This level of duplicity and deception is common in the San Francisco Public Library that has been controlled by an openly-acknowledged "public-private partnership" with corporate philanthropic interests. Estimated to cost nearly $3 million over a five-year period for implementation only, the corporate-sponsored private "Friends & Foundation" would provide $1.3 million in order for the system to serve as a model for libraries nationwide. The "Friends & Foundation" sponsors include Chevron, The Gap, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, etc.

The privacy-shredding technology known as RFID is opposed by numerous organizations in commercial settings, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Consumer Action, Privacy Activism, and many others.

Radio tracking of library books is a small, but crucial step in the regimentation of society and the corporate privatization of nearly everything. It is now established that the "public-private" partnership" of the San Francisco Public Library has been in the forefront of the destruction of the people's culture in the name of "technological advancement." In this case it has been the equivalent of taking away our water in order to sell us Coca-Cola.

Aficionados of caper movies and old James Bond novels know that a very small radio frequency device will allow a person to be tracked without his knowledge. In the days of Sherlock Holmes a scent could be added to one’s shoes that would allow the faithful bloodhound Toby to track the individual in question. Even a recent West Wing involved Martin Sheen giving the bad guy a pen with the advice that "we may get lucky and he will put it in his pocket." The hard part of electronic tracking is planting the radio device on the person or attaching it to the bumper of a car. What if everyone were willing to carry radio frequency identifiers (conventionally known by its acronym, RFID’s) on his or her person at all times? Then it would only be a question of deciding who needed to be tracked.

Would a free people volunteer to carry radio frequency identification tags that would allow them to be tracked at will by either the police, private security, private investigators, commercial spies, deranged hackers, freelance information gatherers, or indeed anyone with a radio frequency reader? At the limit case, terrorists and blackmailers might conceivably make use of the ability track individuals. The more important question is why would anyone volunteer to carry a device that could only be given to him with a court order upon a showing of probable cause? I hope the answer is, no one.

Civil liberties organizations, led by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have called for a moratorium on the placement of these devices in commercial products. The example most often used is the proposal by Wal-Mart to phase these devices into their stores. Most people are shocked when they learn that there is a plan actively being considered by the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco to phase in the use of these RFID devices into library books and all library materials over the next six years. It is bad enough in a commercial setting, but in libraries there is a very fundamental difference. Once you have purchased a commercial product and walked out of the story, you, as the consumer, are free to remove the RFID device and dispose of it – assuming you can find it. In the case of a library book, the RFID tag is designed to remain in the book. Removing the tag would be against the rules and doing so, in violation of the rules, would represent vandalism, at least, and probably attempted theft. (Removing the RFID tags would make theft easier and therefore would constitute a huge security breach that might increase rather than decrease losses to the library collections, but that is another story.)

Representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have described RFID devices as "promiscuous, stealthy and remotely readable" and stated that they should be considered the equivalent of "privacy pollution."

But the greatest harm of RFID tags in library materials is not to the privacy of the public, and it is not harm to our civil liberties. The greatest harm is to the library. The library should be the place where the freedom of inquiry remains inviolate, unmonitored and unevaluated for guilt by association or political incorrectness.

To paraphrase an inordinately successful advertising campaign, the ideal should be, "What happens in the Library, stays in the Library."

Who among us would want to be questioned about, and have to justify to a questioning authority, everything that we borrowed or looked up at a public library? Don’t we assume the answer is, no one would want that.

Now we get to the real question. We are assured by city officials who wish to purchase the Radio Frequency Identification system such a thing would never happen, that governmental inquiries and governmental tracking would never involve library materials and patron records.

We can certainly believe those assurances from certain officials if we chose, and come to the conclusion that, therefore, only a paranoid would believe such intrusions are possible. Do we really want to limit library usage to those who are free of "paranoia"? How many library patrons would be lost if qualifications for a library card included being free of paranoia about the intrusions of big government? To use an extreme example: Is it paranoid to believe that our government can incarcerate individuals in Guantanamo Bay without the protections of the criminal justice system or the protections of the Geneva Conventions and that among them is an American citizen picked up at a Chicago airport. A movie that consists of a pastiche of paranoia is setting box office records for a documentary film. How many librarians really want say to all those people who feel that as a precaution they should never get a library card, "That’s OK with us?"

For the good of libraries, the precaution we want to take is that where people go and what people read cannot be tracked with a Radio Frequency Identification device in the book under their arm.

What They Say About Radio Tracking and Libraries: Civil Liberties Organizations

RFID Position Statement of Consumer, Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations: 

"Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an item-tagging technology with profound societal implications. Used improperly, RFID has the potential to jeopardize consumer privacy, reduce or eliminate purchasing anonymity, and threaten civil liberties." Signed by Forty-five Organizations, including ACLU, EFF, CASPIAN, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Consumer Action, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, et al.

"EFF believes that San Francisco is a bellwether for library RFID adoption in California and perhaps the rest of the country. San Francisco should be a leader in technology – but only in a socially responsible privacy-sensitive way. Today’s RFID’s do not protect privacy. EFF therefore urges the Budget Committee and the Board of Supervisors to reject the Library’s RFID proposal." — July 1, 2004, Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation