RFID once became the target of far-right conspiracies

In the mid-2000s RFID elicited worldwide boycotts from consumer and privacy groups, got tied up in a far-right conspiracy about ObamaCare, and was even feared to be the sign of the Antichrist by some evangelical Christians.

One of the ironies is that the amount of public attention the tags received in the mid-2000s seemed to be inversely proportionate to how many RFID tags were actually in use. Those periods of protests even died down before RFID became nearly as widespread as it is now. One reason could be that the personal data landscape now is more complex than it was in the mid-2000s.

To some degree, the data an organization could get from RFID tags may seem quaint compared to the massive data profiles assembled based on mobile phone data, browsing history, credit card purchases, and so on.