This might be taking things a little simply, but what benefit would there be to putting a completely unique identifier into every pair of jeans, or into every tyre. Would it not be more practical to go the way of the barcode and have 1 number for each product line (including different sized jeans). I suspect that this would be more useful to a company like wal-marts for the simple fact that they don't need a database of unique id's to tell what's in stock, instead they need a number and an amount. This amount would automatically be increased and decreased as stuff entered the store, and was sold. It would then be in their interests to disable the chip after sale, so that their stock count doesn't get confused. The manufacturer may also want to add a batch number, but apart from documents that already have a unique id on them (such as your driving licence, or your vehicle registration document, passport, etc.). Also how much would it take to do a signal count rather than process all of the signal id's? I wouldn't be surprised to find that that is easier to do than checking for unique id's.

RFID's on money, if they wanted to track it now, they could (at least in the UK) as every note has a unique ID.

Finally let's not forget that with some mobile phones they log the GPS location ID with the telephone company already, and GSM phones can all be tracked to within a 1m radius as long as it is switched on. (I remember reading or watching an article about how the Japanese are starting to sell this feature to keep track of pets)

So if we want to go Orwellian picture this scenario, a mobile phone broadcasts a signal to the receiving tower every second or so to let it know where it is. Currently mobile phone thieves can duplicate your phones id using a special hand held device, so now picture that shops start buying these devices so that they know what mobile phones are around. They record the ID and what you bought together. They then sell this to a marketing company who buys lots of company?s information. After compiling this information they then sell it to the highest bidder. Then companies suddenly know that the person with this mobile phone tends to buy this stuff, and uses these credit cards, and has this name, and, and, and. Why don?t they do it, trust, companies need their customers to trust them so that they can sell more. If a customer doesn?t trust a company they won?t buy from them. At this point those companies that are not tracking your information would be advertising the fact, which would increase their customer base thus decreasing the number of customers that go to the companies that do track you. I?ll leave you to follow the logical course this must follow.

The same thing will apply to RFID's.

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