Your Garbage Can Could Be Spying On You 228
macs4all writes "Garbage cans all over England are under surveillance tonight. And not by sleepy, fallible humans. This article in Live Science claims that at least 500,000 'wheelie bins' are now using RFID technology." Though that doesn't sound very dire, the article points out the ease with which your consumer spending habits could be tracked. "Although this is frankly a story that is difficult to take seriously, please note the following. You should remember that many of the articles you buy (and sooner or later throw away) are now also equipped with passive RFID tags that detail the item's brand name and product name. If it's possible to scan the tag on the trash can with an ID, it's possible to use similar equipment to quickly scan your can to uncover your purchasing habits."
Re:also used in disputes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:also used in disputes (Score:5, Informative)
Municipal services (such as domestic rubbish collection, street lights, road maintenance, planning permission) and social housing are all handled by departments within the council. Funding comes from a number of sources, but ultimately it's 90% tax in some form. (You do have to pay rent on council housing)
The purpose of the tags is probably not to investigate buying habits. More likely, it will be combined with weighing equipment on the lorries which take the rubbish away to find out who's throwing out how much. Ostensibly this is to ensure that everyone is using the various recycling schemes properly, though I wouldn't be surprised if it culminates with being charged by weight for the amount of waste produced.
Parents with young children (how exactly do you recycle a nappy/diaper?), those without transport (not all councils take all recyclable material; some won't even take glass) will probably be the most affected by this - and, as you say, most people who fall into both brackets are poorer and so will be screwed harder.
Re:Handling the trash problem the *right* way... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm writing code for this (Score:3, Informative)
The use of the data is that it will allow the recycling organisation to work out which areas are recycling a lot of material and which are not, and the intention is to make that information available back to the public on a 'community' level. What a community is hasn't been precisely defined, but it's going to be larger, probably considerably larger, than postcode purposly so individuals can't be identified. The local authority will make use of the information by identifying areas where it needs to do more to encourage recycling, and possibly to reward communities that are actively recycling.
I honestly don't think there's any significant civil liberty issues here. In effect it's no different than a gas company monitoring the volume of gas each customer uses or a water company doing similar, it's just not been done before because up until now the technology to monitor garbage out (as opposed to the volume of a commodity going in) hasn't been available.
The Government's proposals for ID cards do cause me considerable concern so I'm not at all complacent about the matter, but presumably if we think that encouraging people to recycle is a good thing then collecting data to understand the patterns of people recycling is a helpful approach?