The growing deployment of RFID chips in a number of applications has spooked a number of privacy advocates, who believe that companies, retail outlets, and even government agencies will use data from these chips to keep tabs on people. To that end, the State of New Hampshire is considering whether to pass legislation to regulate the use of RFID chips in order to protect an individual's privacy. Efforts in other states, including Massachusetts and California, have fallen short, so it will be interesting to see if this bellwether state in the presidential primary process will take this step.

At this point, it doesn't seem likely that this bill will pass, only because legislators certainly aren't educated enough about RFID to believe that it will be abused by anyone else. If anyone in the general public has any knowledge about RFID, it's usually in the context of Wal-Mart's use of it to track inventory. Of course, as more details emerge about the potential abuses, then some serious debate will take place. At the same time, it's up to us to set aside the paranoic arguements from those who think that the use of RFID will turn our society into a "1984" scenario and really study what it's pros and cons are.